Pa. — February may seem far away, but Big Ten Academic Alliance faculty, staff and students are preparing now for 2027 Love Data Week and the BTAA Data Viz Championships — data literacy advocacy events supporting academic success.
Love Data Week is an annual, collaborative celebration that brings together the Big Ten Academic Alliance member universities to explore, share and celebrate all things data.
Student Data Viz Championship
This year’s student competition has a sports theme. The Data Viz Student Championship, which begins with a contest at each member institution, is built on an NCAA Women’s Basketball data set, and every student entry must use it. Penn State undergraduate and graduate students are invited to turn the data into a visualization and enter it in the Penn State Data Visualization Championship. The Penn State finalist will then represent the University in the 2027 BTAA Data Viz Championship, which culminates in a showcase of finalists from across the alliance during Love Data Week.
Entries can be produced with software or as physical objects documented in photos and video. To see similar data visualizations based on last year’s college fight song theme, visit the 2026 student finalist gallery.
Instructors are encouraged to bring the data set into relevant courses, said Jennifer Valcin, statistician in the University Libraries’ <a href="https://libraries.psu.edu/about/departments/research-data-stewardship” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Research Data Stewardship Department and Penn State’s Love Data Week coordinator.
“The data set works as a required or optional class activity, a make-up assignment or an extra credit option,” Valcin said. “Any of those gives students a real reason to practice data analysis, data visualization and data storytelling, and the strongest entries can go on to represent Penn State.”
Faculty and Staff Data Viz Championship
Faculty and staff have a championship of their own. They can enter existing work that is publicly available or create new visuals from public data that highlight the Big Ten. Faculty and staff also may participate in the competition by submitting either existing work that is publicly available or visuals created using public data that highlight the Big Ten. Visit the 2026 faculty/staff gallery to see research, projects and institutional insight submissions, including a Penn State faculty duo’s entry, which won both the judged and popular 2026 championship awards.
That entry, “Challenged Stitches: A Quilt with Banned Book Data,” was created by Laura Guertin, distinguished professor of Earth sciences at Penn State Brandywine, and Annie Jansen, interim head librarian at the Brandywine Campus Library . The quilt turns 11 years of American Library Association data on challenged books into a bar graph, one bar per year, with each bar stitched to represent a book, making trends in censorship visible at a glance. It was a fitting answer to the 2026 theme of “Where’s the Data?” and its call for fresh approaches to understanding data.
After earning the Penn State Faculty/Staff Data Visualization Award, the pair and their quilt represented the University at the BTAA Data Viz Championship and took its two top honors. Read more about their winning collaboration in this Penn State News story.
Each BTAA institution holds its own competition and sends one student entry and one faculty/staff entry on to the BTAA Data Viz Championship. Entries for both the student and faculty/staff competitions are due Dec. 7, 2026, and can be submitted using this link. Details on the Penn State competition, including entry guidelines, are available at the Penn State Love Data Week website. Participants at other Big Ten institutions can contact their institutional coordinator.
Penn State Careers in Data Science Fair
Penn State’s Love Data Week schedule will again include the Careers in Data Science Fair, planned for the afternoon of Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2027. The fair offers an informal setting for one-on-one and small-group conversations with data professionals from across the University about career pathways, skill development and professional decision-making.
Last year’s fair drew participants from Penn State Data Commons, the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, Data Science and Analytics in University Development and the Research Data Stewardship Department and the Donald W. Hamer Center for Maps and Geospatial Information, both in the University Libraries.
Time, location and participating units for 2027 will be announced closer to the event.
Fall Data Skills Workshops
Students and researchers who want to strengthen their data skills before the entry deadline can attend the Research Data Stewardship Department’s fall workshops, which cover data topics including Data Management and Sharing, ScholarSphere and Data Analysis tools such as RStudio. The full schedule and registration details are available online.
Love Data Week events at Penn State are co-organized by the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research and the University Libraries’ Research Data Stewardship Department. They coincide with the BTAA’s free, virtual Love Data Week programming, scheduled for Feb. 8-12, 2027.
Held each February, Love Data Week brings BTAA member universities together to explore, share and celebrate data through workshops, panels and competitions open to students, faculty and staff from Big Ten institutions.
Last Updated September 11, 2026
