The Visual Data Storytelling contest celebrates its 10th year in 2026. This contest celebrates the emerging data communication genre, including data storytelling, narrative visualizations, explanatory notebooks, visual essays, and more. It aims to encourage students, researchers, and practitioners to demonstrate the value of data visualization by creating creative and compelling visual data stories. The contest will be held in conjunction with IEEE PacificVis 2026 from April 20-23, 2026 in Sydney, Australia.
PacificVis is a unified visualization symposium welcoming all areas of visualization, such as information, scientific, graph, security, and software visualization. Storytellers are invited to submit visual data-driven stories that draw upon (or intersect with) any of these areas. In addition, entries that focus on computational journalism and artistic design projects are encouraged. Unlike contests such as the IEEE VAST challenge or the IEEE SciVis Contest, the data for the PacificVis visual data storytelling contest is intentionally left unspecified; you are free to choose any publicly available dataset(s). Similarly, the task that storytellers are to accomplish is to successfully communicate a message or series of messages (i.e., a narrative, a series of insights) using data visualization techniques. The story's themes can draw from any topic, including current affairs, history, natural disasters, and research findings from the sciences and humanities. Entries may be submitted by teams or individuals from industry and academia. Conference sponsors can participate non-competitively. Submissions must fulfill the requirements explained below.
Potential contest entrants are encouraged to review the following for inspiration:
The Information is Beautiful Awards
The Tapestry Conference
The Malofiej Infographics World Summit
The Pudding
NYT Graphics
Visualizing Data
Explorable Explanations
Google News Lab
Once Upon a Time: From Data to Stories John Schwabish @ Socrata Connect 2017
Animation, Pacing, and Exposition Tony Chu @ OpenVisConf 2016
Where's Larry? Bringing Data to Life Through Story Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic @ Tapestry Conference 2017
A collection of images, charts, infographics, data comics, and/or data visualization that convey a story using engaging visual designs.
Example 1 and Example 2.
A cinematic animation that tells a data-driven story using visualizations. Note that video submissions that appear to be tutorials or demonstrations of a visualization tool will not be considered; the focus of the submission must be a visual narrative about the data, not a visualization tool or technique. Example.
Interactive articles, markups, and notebooks that guide the reader through a narrative using text and visualizations. Examples of explainable notebook platforms include Distill, Idyll, and Observable.
An interactive web page that guides the user through the story. Note that purely analytic or exploratory visualization tools/dashboards that do not provide guidance or storytelling to the user will not be considered.
Stories that go beyond traditional desktop interfaces, including those that use headsets and tablets/mobile devices, are also encouraged. For such submissions, we encourage you to submit a video in the initial submission, and if accepted, will work with you to demo your story during the conference.
Other forms of interactive storytelling work, such as audio-visual projects, physicalization, game-based storytelling, and more, are also encouraged to submit. A video is likely the best way to make the initial submission. For unconventional entries that are accepted, we will work with the artists/authors to decide the best possible way to exhibit the work at the conference.
Submissions should also adhere to the following requirements:
(1) The story must feature a visual representation of data generated by various techniques such as computer programming (e.g., D3.js or three.js), manual illustration (e.g., using pen & paper, physical objects, or illustration software), or other relevant techniques. Third-party techniques or applications may be used in conjunction with the author's own work as long as proper credit is given to their respective creators and it is made clear which aspects of the implementation represent the authors' own work.
(2) Entries must be original data-driven stories that have not been previously published elsewhere.
(3) The dataset(s) used in the story must be publicly available, and linked to, sourced, or otherwise referenced.
(4) The story content can be in any language, but accompanying explanations should be provided in English. This will help our judges provide a proper evaluation of your submission.
(5) A 150-word abstract (entered on the PCS submission website) that may briefly describe the purpose of the story along with the data analysis and design process undertaken by the storyteller(s). The abstract should not include the message(s) communicated by the story; the story must stand alone in this regard such that a viewer should not need to read the abstract to understand the story.
(6) Supplementary materials are encouraged. For example, high-resolution images, videos, audio files, or other materials to show design processes that will help reviewers evaluate the submission.
(7) For the accepted entries, we will expect the following additional requirements:
Submit via the Precision Conference System site using the PacificVis 2026 Storytelling Contest track.
A jury of visualization and data storytelling experts will carefully judge each submission and make the selection of accepted entries. Successful entries will effectively communicate a narrative, message(s), or insight(s) using visual representations of data. Each judge assigned to a submission will give the submission a score from 1 to 5, and they will be asked the following questions:
Accepted submissions will be published on the PacificVis Storytelling Contest website. A selected set of accepted entries will receive awards (Honorable Mention and Best Storytelling Awards). Awards will be presented to the winners during the conference.
Submission Deadline
Notification Date
Camera-Ready Deadline
Present at PacificVis 2026
