Visualising Research: using data visualisation to explore how research is funded in the UK

Around £3 billion of Government funding is apportioned annually between the seven UK Research Councils. This investment creates a huge amount of information, which is held in the ‘Gateway to Research’ database and available for anyone to access online. But how can people make sense of this mass of complex data in its raw form?

Inspired by the British Library’s newest exhibition, Beautiful Science, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)and the British Library have launched a competition which challenges entrants to create a striking visualisation using this data, and reveal to the public how research is funded in the UK.

‘Visualising Research’ is open to designers, graphic artists, software developers, programmers and anyone with an interest in data visualisation. The winning entry will need to tell a compelling story that anyone will be able to understand, and will make use of the complex data available in the Research Councils UK database. Anyone can enter from around the world– either as an individual or with others, and the winning entry will be awarded a £2000 cash prize.

The closing date for the competition is 21 March 2014, and our judges include Professor Jackie Hunter, Chief Executive, BBSRC, Katy Börner, the Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science at Indiana University and the Guardian Digital Agency.