2021 Data Visualization Competition
Compete for Cash Prizes!
Our fourth annual data visualization competition is back! Submit your best viz for the chance to present your visualization at our conference and win cash prizes.
- First place will receive $1000
- Second place will receive $750
- Third place will receive $500
The results are in!
Important Dates
- May 24, 2021Entry Deadline
- June 4, 2021Top 10 submissions posted & voting opens
- July 6, 2021Top 5 Finalists Revealed
- July 22, 2021Finalists compete for top prizes at the 2021 Conference
FAQ
Can I use an existing data visualization that I have made before?
Yes! Use any data viz you created!
Can I submit an viz with a team?
Yes! You create a team of up to 4 people. All winnings will be split between the team members.
If I cannot attend the conference in person, can I still participate?
Absolutely! We can pre-record an overview of your visualization and play it during the event.
Interested in Sponsoring?
Sponsorship Benefits
Logo placement on website and all marketing/promotional materials for the competition event
Tableau speaker will get 5 minutes to talk about Tableau and will announce the winners at the end of the competition
Social media promotion of the visualization virtual event (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram)
Blog post and newsletter introducing and promoting the data visualization virtual event
WIA will cover all prep work for the event including creating of marketing materials, registration and event hosting platform, agenda, slides, preparation calls, and voting coordination
Vote for the Top 5!
How to Vote:
1. Click on each top 10 visualization
2. Read about the submission
3. Vote for your favorite!
4. Share with your friends!
Voting closes July 4th, 2021.
2021 Top 10 Finalist Visualizations
Click on the images below to interact with that visualization!
Global Health Indicators
My visualisation investigates global health and well-being indicators based on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals initiative. It is an exploratory visualisation and it makes use of the ‘small multiples’ technique to present each of the 20 indicators in a concise manner with key figures. The viewer is invited to choose their own country and track its progress.
Women in Government Worldwide
Gender equality and female representation is important to both of us. We decided to use this platform to help inform why it’s important to have women leaders in national governments, some of the challenges toward the path to gender parity, and provide resources for those who want to support and learn more about these efforts. Our visualization illustrates the gender parity problem in national governments, the barriers and facilitators to increasing the number of women in government, and how the quality of life for all citizens, especially women, can improve as the number of women in national governments increases. We utilized research from the UN Women and Council on Foreign Relations to select the metrics to tell the story. We pulled data from the World Bank, Alteryx to clean and prep the data, and Tableau to visualize our story. We chose to use data from 2018-2019 because that was the most complete data year in the World Bank for the metrics selected. Because data from the World Bank are mainly percentages, our design focuses around trends in countries that have greater than or less that 30% women, rather than overall averages, to avoid the “average of averages” problem.
The First Two
My “the first 2” visualization is very close to my heart because it reminds me of the most difficult moment of my life: the first 2 years of my twins They were born in the USA (Houston) as we were expat at the time. We were first time parents, with 2 babies to care about, no baby care experience of newborn care and zero family support. It was hard… My life just felt out of control and as an Analyst deep down I knew I had to use data to make some reasoning out of this craziness. I discovered the Baby Tracker App and this app literally saves my life, as I finally had a tool that helped me understand what was going and be prepared for the next day, or the next nap transition, etc… I was extremely dedicated to track all this data as I felt I needed to build a viz down the line, to show the reconigition that women deserved for all this. So this is what this viz is about, summarizing all the craziness that happened in the first 2 years of a baby. From the baby but also the parents perspective (i.e. sleep deprivation wise)
Techniques: dashboard layout, powerpoint, Gantt chart, 24hours Donuts and 10days average
Design: I wanted to keep it light and cheerful and used a color palette from the background image.
Insight: we lost an equivalent of 2 months of sleep over the first 2 years!!!
US Gun Epidemic
My data visualisation is about the gun epidemic in the US with a specific focus on police brutality and how the African American community are disproportionately affected.
Fire Walk with Me
My superpower is never being bored. I have tons of hobbies: I’m a heavy reader, I like riding my bike, cooking, listening to podcasts, but I probably spend the most time watching series. Last year this added up to 645 hours of content, that is 27 whole days. By looking at this number, I was half proud – half ashamed, but let me tell you, it was a damn fine year!
Prepare to be disappointed: I haven’t scraped the data but logged everything I watched each day to a spreadsheet. At the end of the year, I double-checked the Rotten Tomato and IMDB scores if they changed. I was anxious all the time that I might have forgotten to make a note of something that would ruin my whole project, but I managed to follow through. This was one of my hardest ideas to execute, and I’m 100% sure I wouldn’t do it again. If I’d get paid for the hours I spent building the dataset, drinks would be on me. I still have PTSD when I’m watching something and realizing this should have been logged.
For the visualization I used Tableau and Adobe Illustrator with a 4 component layering technique.
The Potential of Female Wealth
The visualization explores ‘The Potential of Female Wealth’. Females have a large impact on the global market and yet hold fewer executive roles, hold less wealth, and are paid less compared to males. This visualization calls out some alarming details and examines reasons why we collectively should all care and act.
A Doctor. A Pandemic. A Mental Health Battle.
This visualization was my entry for Tableau IronViz Contest 2020 where the theme was about health and wellbeing. It was during the COVID-19 pandemic, and while we were still shocked and did not fully understand what was going on, suddenly there were lockdowns and many of us started to work from home, doctors and nurses were on the front line everyday fighting for lives including those of patients and their own. I wanted to bring more awareness to the physical but more importantly, the difficult mental battles that the healthcare workers were facing as well as to explore whether healthcare systems and their workers worldwide are well equipped and well supported for such a sudden and terrifying pandemic. The monochrome black and white design was to honor the selflessness and sacrifices of our frontline heroes who lost their lives while protecting others’.
LEPROSY, India's hidden plague!
The visualization I present is about a long forgotten disease LEPROSY- a disease that WHO has declared the world to be free of. However, India still suffers remarkably from leprosy with continuous transmission & has been at the top position more than decades. My main focus is to get an awareness among people about the disease & to enable them to rethink the measures taken to declare the world to be leprosy free.
I focus on a longform dashboard to present my narrative in parts:
Firstly, I present the global overview to emphasize how concentrated the disease is in India and has been for over 20 years. I use the technique of combining map & bump chart to highlight both issues together. My technique can be referred in this blog. https://vizartpandey.com/bridging-map-with-diverse-charts/
I depict the causes for the issue with a multiple layer Sankey funnel graph to visually represent the magnitude of each cause affecting the leprosy transmission. Have utilized scatter plots to highlight the positions India holds.
Various reasons rule for different states to have the highest no of cases & I chose to highlight those sections & the reasons for them. You could choose to highlight the leprosy centers to see the distribution of centers along with the density of cases.
Lastly, I provide a timeline of measures taken by the government to bring a change.
I want to emphasize that a world is leprosy free not with just ELIMINATION but it has to be with ERADICATION.
Every Mother Counts: Exploring Maternal Health
My visualisation ‘Every Mother Counts: Exploring Maternal Health’ aims to highlight the continued and urgent need for maternal health around the world, in particular, in lower income countries. My visualisation shows that The World Health Organisation estimates more than 300,000 women die each year from pregnancy related causes, and in most cases, the causes of death are preventable. Furthermore, despite maternal related deaths declining around the world, with our current rate of progress, we will fall short of our target by more than 1 million lives. At its core, maternal health is a human rights issue – a gender equality issue.
I’ve used a minimal colour palette – a dark background against a stark contrasting red to highlight important facets of information. I wanted the main issues and themes to stand out and not be missed by the audience. The visualisation was built in Tableau. There are tool tips that provide the audience extra information beyond what is included in the main visualisation and clickable links to other important websites if the audience would like more information on the topic.
This issue is very close to my heart, and in creating this visualisation, I want every mother everywhere to know that they are important – that they matter, that they count.
Not on our watch
This project has started with one visualization and turned into a full-scale visual storytelling that illustrates activism and political violence against women during the COVID-19 Pandemic Burst. Just think, for every news headline you read, there are hundreds of daily attacks on women that go unreported. What was really happening during COVID-19? Can it be visualized to raise empathy and awareness?
Our research is based on the ACLED database {curated data about political activities and violence around the world} and our own tracked stories. It combines different visualizations, like comparison charts, a Sanaky diagram, a cluster dendrogram, and a’ flowers’ map. Each has been designed uniquely, but derived from one visual language of predefined structural elements (as line, shape, color scheme, form, proportion) and principles (as balance, unity, emphasis, white space) to communicate this sensitive data. For example, “Hair me out!” has started from a simple draft of a Sankey diagram, displaying events during the “COVID-19 Pandemic Burst”, but as I worked more with it, the bands of data transformed in my mind into strands of hair belonging to the women’s hidden stories behind that data.
The insights that are revealed demonstrate both uplifting and alarming trends in political protests and violence. The world kept turning and violence did not cease despite this pandemic.
Story at:https://medium.com/nightingale/not-on-our-watch-17907b86b985
Details
How it Works
- Enter by submitting your best visualization by May 24th, 2021
- Top 10 submissions will be revealed and posted on the WIA website on June 4th, 2021. Visit the website and cast your vote for your favorite entry to help us select the top 5 finalists.
- At the 2021 Conference on July 22nd we'll showcase the top 5 finalists!
- Popular vote will determine which top three finalists win cash prizes!
What type of visualization can I submit?
Virtual or Augmented Reality
Physical medium (e.g. paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs)
RStudio / RShiny
Graph, Chart, Visual, or Tool created via a software program (e.g. Adobe, Google, Excel)
Tableau Dashboard
Google Data Studio
Want to see more amazing visualizations?
Check out the top visualizations from previous years' competitions.
Stay in loop!
Sign up for our newsletter for the latest updates on Data Viz deadlines, finalists, voting, and more.