Fall 2025 Data Visualization Contest

The UTA Libraries hosted a data visualization contest in fall 2025 to encourage students to explore the CTT collection. We shared the following prompt to fuel participants' imaginations.

UTA Libraries invites students to participate in the Data Visualization Contest, where creativity meets scholarship. This year's contest draws from the "Covers, Titles, and Tables" project, a collection tracing nearly 200 years of American literary anthologies. From shifting genres to the rise and fall of literary voices, your challenge is transforming raw data into a powerful visualization that sparks new understanding.

Participants will use tables of contents from the CTT collection (https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/exhibit/ctt/ or https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/english_ctt/) to produce a creative and meaningful data visualization that sheds light on topics including:

• Trends in author inclusion across anthologies
• Shifts in genre or thematic representation
• The rise and fall of literary prominence
• Any other compelling story the data reveals!

To guide your thinking, read the collection’s Introduction essay (https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/exhibit/ctt/introduction/), which asks questions like

• Where Does “American” literature Begin and Why Does that Matter?
• Who is a “Major” American Author,
• What is a “Major” American Trend/Theme/Concern?
• How Do Anthologies Spatially and Rhetorically Weigh/Answer these Questions?

Contest Winners

The contest's winners were Noelle Pastor and Andrew Renfrow, who submitted several visualizations as part of a project entitled "Top American Authors in 19-21st Century Literary Anthologies." As part of their submission, the winners shared the following project description:

What we learned

From tables of contents of American literary anthologies, we were able to understand who are considered ‘major’ American authors, using page counts and relative percentage of total pages. Furthermore, we compared the actual number of anthologies authors were featured in to see prominence. We learned that poets like Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman were featured the most overall, with high page counts and number of occurrences. Interestingly, while we found that Native American Literature was moderately to frequently included in Literary Anthologies, the amount of pages it received was very small compared to other authors occurring just as frequently. This shows what authors of these anthologies consider "major" and "prominent" in the history of American Literature.

What's next for our project: Top American Authors in 19th - 21st Century Anthologies

We feel that with time, many more stories are able to be told from this data. We look forward to next identifying what themes are considered "major" in American Literature and how this changes over time, as well as further exploring author representation with regard to gender and race.

The contest winners' submissions are below. To view full sized images, visit the contest submission page on DevPost.

Videos and images on this page are reused by permission of Noelle Pastor and Andrew Renfrow, the copyright holders. For questions about these images, please email jessica.mcclean@uta.edu.