Creative Topic

The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual international music competition among primarily European countries. Each participating country submits an original song to be performed live, and then casts votes to determine the winner. The contest has a particular voting system, which often highlights cultural connections and friendly rivalries between nations, in addition to the quality of the songs.

Like last year, we again have a single creative topic, and each participant may submit one drawing on this topic for evaluation.

Eurovision dataset

We are interested in seeing voting patterns across years in Eurovision. In particular, we want to see if particular patterns of voting between countries have changed or remained consistent across years.

As the dataset spans across multiple years, and it includes additional information, the graph is to be considered dynamic and multivariate.

Voting in Eurovision has two parts:

  • Jury vote
  • Public vote

As the voting system has slightly changed through the years (in amount of votes given per year), we suggest to check out this wikipedia page detailing the amount of votes and methodology used for counting them: Voting at the Eurovision Song Contest.

The winner is determined based on the total sum of these two types of votes.

Github link: Eurovision dataset

The visualization should focus on voting patterns between countries through the years.

Evaluation

You are completely free to use any graph drawing style you wish. We leave it up to the contestants how they produce the drawing. Any tool is allowed to generate the poster and the drawing.

The expectation is that the visualization represents the relational information between the vertices. Whether all edges and vertices are to be visualized is left to the authors: we would ideally push to visualize every edge individually, but authors might decide to only select a subset of the information in the dataset. The visualization submitted should still strive to represent the vast majority of the relational information. Furthermore, every submission should show use at least some of the available metadata. To facilitate the choice for which metadata to visualize, we ask each submission to specify one or a few questions that you want to answer with your visualization. Your submission should strive to structurally and thematically provide an answer to your own proposed question(s).

The following is a set of questions that the authors might use as inspiration for what could be inferred from the dataset:

  • Can you spot some particular voting patterns across years and between countries?
  • Are there countries that consistently vote for each other?
  • Are there instances where the public vote is consistently different from the jury vote?

The questions are meant as inspiration for the authors, and they might decide to formulate their own set of questions. We suggest to explicitly state the questions the authors wanted to answer with their visualization directly on the poster, either as part of the title or as part of the textual content of it.

The authors can also consider enriching the dataset with additional information - for instance, by integrating geographical coordinates or additional information about the songs and artiss.

Your submissions will be judged on a list of criteria that includes, but is not limited to, readability, aesthetics, novelty, and design quality. We’re looking for submissions that show the general structure well, and reveal fun, interesting, curious and/or thought-provoking aspects of the provided data.

In case your submission showcases the result of a tool, you may also provide a link to the (online) tool. Note that even in this case, your submission should be able to provide a compelling drawing in a static and non-interactive way, for example on a poster; see also Submission for the exact submission format. In case of sufficient submissions and no clear winner between submissions that do and do not showcase tools can be determined, the committee reserves the possibility to award multiple first, second, or third places.

Submission

We plan to handle the submission through Easychair. The deadline and submission platform will be updated later in the year.