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About

The Visual Data Storytelling Contest celebrates its 11th year in 2027. 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 2027 from April 19-22, 2027 in Busan, South Korea.

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 events and venues for inspiration:

Entries from previous contests
Sites that Combine Vis and Storytelling
Talks on data-driven storytelling

Submission Requirements

Storytelling submissions can take several forms — pick the medium that best carries your narrative:

🖼️

Images, Infographics & Data Comics

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.

🎬

Videos & Animations

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.

📓

Data Notebooks & Interactive Articles

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.

🌐

Websites

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.

🕶️

Immersive & Augmented Experiences

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.

✨

Unconventional Forms

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.

Additional Requirements

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:
    • At the camera-ready deadline, you will submit a 3–6 minute demo video describing the story. (Exact details will be sent out to accepted entries.)
    • At least one member of the team must register and attend PacificVis 2027 to present your story.

Submission Process

Submit via the Precision Conference System site using the PacificVis 2027 Visual Data Storytelling Contest track.

  • Static entries such as infographics and data comics should be submitted in PDF format.
  • Videos should be in mp4 format, with a maximum file size of 300 MB.
  • Explainable articles and websites can be submitted as a web URL. Such entries should be directly runnable in a browser without downloading or installing packages/libraries/etc.
  • If you have chosen to submit a URL (i.e., a website submission or an online version of your video or image submission), please add the URL in the abstract field.
  • As mentioned above, for "unconventional" story formats (mixed reality, physicalizations, audio-video experiences, etc.), we recommend initially submitting a video of your story.

Reviewing and Awards

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:

  • Is the story novel?
  • Is the story original (i.e., the author's own work not previously published elsewhere)?
  • Is the story trustworthy and functional (i.e., is the message clearly communicated)?
  • Is the story engaging and beautiful?
  • Is the story informative and enlightening?
  • Are the submission requirements met?

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.

Important Deadlines

All deadlines are at 11:59pm (23:59) Anywhere on Earth (AoE) unless otherwise stated.

February 1, 2027 Submission Deadline
February 15, 2027 Notification Date
March 1, 2027 Camera-Ready Deadline
April 19–22, 2027 Present at PacificVis 2027

Committees

Contest Chairs


Linping Yuan
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Angelos Chatzimparmpas
Utrecht University

Contest Judges

Coming soon...

Contact

pvis27-vst_chairs@googlegroups.com