Call for Data, Web Science 2014 Visualization Challenge

Posted December 6, 2013

We are delighted to announce the Web Science 2014 Visualization Challenge! The web has generated huge amounts of data at massive scale, but making sense of these datasets and representing them in a compact and easily-interpretable way remains very difficult. The goal of this challenge is to encourage innovative visualizations of web data. We particularly encourage entries that reflect the interdisciplinary spirit of the Web Science conference. To enable this visualization, we have prepared several large-scale, easy-to-use, publicly-available datasets:

1. Web traffic data, including more than 200 million HTTP requests from browsers to servers;

2. Twitter data, including a sample of more than 22 million tweets;

3. Social bookmarking data, consisting of about 430,000 bookmarked pages;
4. Co-authorship of academic papers, consisting of about 21.5 million papers and 10.8 million authors

Complete details on these datasets are available here: http://cnets.indiana.edu/groups/nan/webtraffic/websci14-data. All of the datasets are stored in simple file formats, so that they can be easily used without much technical expertise.

We are pleased to offer a cash prize of at least $1000 to be split among the winning entries. Winners will be announced and displayed at the WebScience conference in June 2014, presented on the WebScience website, and the winners will be encouraged to present a poster at the conference describing their work. The entries will be judged based on four criteria: (1) innovative use of data, (2) clarity of visualization, (3) quality of design, and (4) potential impact.

Rules:

1. For fairness, the visualization must be primarily based on the data that we provide. Other datasets may be used to augment ours, but these datasets must be publicly-available and described in detail in the documentation (see #4 below).
2. The visualization must be a static image, and must be submitted as a PDF. In addition to the main PDF, please submit a PNG version at a resolution of about 640×480, for display on web pages, social media sites, mobile devices, etc. This PNG version need not contain the full visualization, but should be an appropriate representation (e.g. a subset of the full PDF).

3. Please include a separate PDF file containing a description of the visualization, including: (1) name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information of the creator(s), (2) the purpose of the visualization, (3) which dataset(s) were used, (4) a brief description of how the visualizations was created, and (5) any other information you would like to share with the judges.
4. By submitting your visualization, you agree to allow us to display your visualization at the conference and on the Web Science website and social media channels. (We will give proper attribution, of course.) You also certify that you are the copyright holder of the visualization and are authorized to give us this permission.
5. Entries are due by 11:59PM Hawaii time on April 15, 2014. Please e-mail your entry to David Crandall. (If you do not receive a confirmation email within 24 hours, your entry has not been received and should be re-sent.)

Panel of judges:
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Indiana University
Katy Borner, Indiana University
Mark Meiss, Google
Dimitar Nikolov, Indiana University

Maximilian Schich, University of Texas

Opportunities for Current Students