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Young Marsilius Fellows - YMF 2023/24Competition “DATA IS ART”

Call for Participation

Submission deadline: June 14th, 2024 
Exhibition: July 18th, 2024 at the event “From End to beginning – an Interdisciplinary Adventure”

We, the Young Marsilius Fellows (YMF) 2023-24, an interdisciplinary group of postdoctoral researchers, are opening a call for participation for our competition “Data is Art”. This contest aims to showcase the artistic side of data and research. We invite everyone at Heidelberg University and non-university research institutes in Heidelberg an Mannheim to send us their most creative ideas for data visualization. As an interdisciplinary group, data means different things to all of us, so we are curious to see what your discipline uses or understands as data. For instance, data can be (but are of course not limited to) any type of numbers, text or images that convey information. If you need some inspiration, you can find great examples at https://informationisbeautiful.net/ .

Inspired by the Dear Data art exhibition (http://www.dear-data.com/theproject), we believe any discipline can make research accessible and beautiful. We will select some of the most artistic yet informative graphs or visualizations and curate them for an exhibition at our YMF event on July 18, 2024. The selected submissions will be printed out on DIN A0, for everyone to view. On that day, all attendees will participate in the selections of the winners, so we look forward to seeing you all there. The Marsilius Kolleg will invite the authors of the three top-rated posters to an exclusive two-hour workshop followed by a dinner with the Nature Marsilius Visiting Professor for the winter semester 2024/25.

Plakat Data is Art, Wettberwerb Young Marsilius Fellows

The deadline for submission is June 14th, 2024

Those whose work will be exhibited at the event will be notified in advance. Each person can submit one artwork and can form a group of up to three individuals for the submission.

The jury will take into consideration the following criteria to select the visualizations that will be displayed at the YMF event:

  • The work should be self-explanatory:
    Every good graph or in general data visualization should be understood without the need for a textual explanation. We want your submissions to follow this principle: by looking at it people should understand what you’re trying to communicate. You are free to add legends or titles, but not a written explanation of the submission.
  • It should somehow connect to the title of the event: “From End to Beginning – An Interdisciplinary Adventure”
    This year, we as Young Marsilius Fellows managed to connect our incredibly different disciplines by thinking of ends as new beginnings. What about your data? What are the ends and do they lead to new beginnings? 
  • It should be visually attractive. 
    Data visualization, although scientific in its nature, can be fun and amazing. As you may have seen in the examples, you can make it colourful, striking, and pleasing to the eye.
  • The work should be creative and original. 
    The sky is the limit! Be creative and have fun creating your submission. Think beyond pie charts, histograms and boxplots and consider diverse ways to communicate data. 

Please note the terms and conditions of the competition below. If you have further questions, please contact 
Dr. Paula Arana Barbier, YMF, Sociology, 
paula.arana@mwi.uni-heidelberg.de
Dr. Saskia Haupt, YMF, Mathematics, 
saskia.haupt@uni-heidelberg.de 
Tobias Just, administrative director of the Marsilius-Kolleg, 
just@mk.uni-heidelberg.de 

We look forward to your submissions and are curious to see some surprising, creative, beautiful, yet informative visualizations of very different types of data, both from the sciences and the humanities.

The Young Marsilius Fellows 2023-24 
Héctor Álvarez Mella, Paula Maria Arana Barbier, Chris Byrohl, Anja Greinacher, Saskia Haupt, Wikke Jansen, Mischa von Krause, André Pfob, Jan Rombouts, Raphael Schäfer, Katja Seitz

By submitting your poster, you accept the following terms and conditions

  • You assure the Marsilius Kollege and Heidelberg University that you or your team (max. 3 persons) are the only authors of the poster and hold the full copyright. You hereby confirm that no other natural or legal person has any rights to your poster, either in whole or in part.  
  • You acknowledge the decisions made by the selection jury and the participants of the Young Marsilius Fellows final event on July 18, 2024. Please note that there is no guarantee that your poster will be exhibited. Legal recourse is excluded.
  • Additionally, you grant the Marsilius Kolleg of Heidelberg University the right to forward the poster you have submitted digitally to the current Young Marsilius Fellows and other persons involved in the evaluation process.
  • By submitting your poster, you grant the Marsilius Kolleg and Heidelberg University the unlimited right to publicly display it in both printed and digital form, including on their homepage and social media, for the purpose of public relations. Your name will always be stated as the author. 
  • If your poster is selected for the exhibition, you shall submit a high-resolution version of your poster by July 11, 2024.