The 2026 Northwestern Data Viz Championship asked participating University students, faculty, and staff to show off their skills using data from college fight songs.
Andre Bianchi and Sophia Perez ran with the opportunity, winning the competition at the Jan. 27 judging. They earned the right to represent Northwestern at the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Viz Championship, held virtually on Feb.13.
“It felt really good to win the Northwestern Data Viz Championship,” said Bianchi, a second-year student in Northwestern Engineering’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. “We lowered our expectations after submitting because we’d be competing against other great students, some with more experience than we have, but we were proud of our project, and being recognized for it felt really rewarding.”
The team developed a dashboard that highlights how recurring themes—like “fight” or “victory”—appear across songs. By analyzing patterns by year, conference, and authorship, their visualization reveals historical trends and shows how certain tropes have shaped the character of fight songs over time.
The project hit close to home for Perez. Having grown up immersed in Texas football culture, Perez focused on trope usage, noting that nearly half of the dataset’s variables tracked these recurring words and themes. Using Python and Shiny, Perez and Popovic combined computational analysis with design to create a visualization that tells the story of how fight songs reflect each school’s identity, traditions, and broader culture. The duo also analyzed how the usage of tropes changed according to the year the song was composed.
“Through this experience, I learned that combining quantitative analysis with visualization tools, creativity, and design can reveal deeper patterns and highlight the human experiences behind the data,” said Perez, a second-year student at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences majoring in data science. “I hope to continue developing this approach in future research projects, internships, and career opportunities.”
A significant challenge for the team was figuring out how to approach the dataset without a specific prompt. They began by searching for patterns in the data that could tell a story and found that analyzing trope usage allowed them to examine the fight songs from multiple angles, ultimately creating a complete narrative about how recurring themes shape each tune.
The competition also presented a steep learning curve. The project required the team to build a polished, public-facing dashboard using Shiny. With no prior experience in UI design or web app development, they invested significant time learning how to make the dashboard both functional and user-friendly, gaining valuable skills in accessibility and interface design along the way.
“This project made me pay attention to the communication side of research. You could have done a great job in your analysis, but if you are not able to present it well in an understandable way, no one will pay attention to it,” Bianchi said. “We spent most of our project trying to find ways of making our plots clearer and engaging, trying to tell the reader a story through our data. Those skills are valuable, particularly in science communication and outreach.”