Celebrate the creativity and insights of York University students by attending the Data Storytelling Challenge Exhibition! Join us for the exhibition’s opening reception on March 5th, 2026, from 4-7pm by reserving your spot on Eventbrite.
Not available on March 5? You can also visit the exhibit during March 2-20 during the exhibition's open hours, listed below.
As part of York University Libraries’ inaugural Data Storytelling Challenge, students were invited to explore data storytelling through a medium of their choice, digital or physical. Selected submissions have been curated into this exhibition, showcasing a wide range of approaches to data visualization, storytelling, and making.
During the opening reception, winning submissions will be announced, and attendees will be invited to vote for a People’s Choice Award. After the opening reception, this page will be updated to announce the winners of the Challenge.
Exhibition Theme: Land * Machine
The exhibition is organized around the theme Land * Machine, which asks:
How can data storytelling help us understand and cherish the land we inhabit, while we simultaneously create and deploy increasingly numerous and complex machines?
At a time when data and technology are omnipresent, yet often abstract or disconnected from lived experience, these works translate data into stories that ground technology in place, culture, and local environments. Through visualization and making, the exhibition highlights how data can become a bridge between everyday life, technological systems, and the land that sustains us.
Opening Reception Event Details
- Free and open to the public, including all members of the York University community
- Drop-in event
- Light refreshments provided
- Registered attendees will receive a program to help guide their visit
Exhibition gallery hours
Can’t make the opening reception? You will be missed, but you don’t have to miss the exhibition! Drop in between Monday, March 2, 2026, and Friday, March 20, 2026, any time during the gallery’s open hours:
- Mondays, 9:30am-5pm
- Tuesdays, 2:30pm - 4:30pm
- Thursdays, 2:30pm - 5pm
- Fridays, 9:30am-5pm
- Saturdays, 1-3pm
Questions?
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly or at datalib@yorku.ca.
Exhibition Program
Amy Agur
Undergraduate, Health
A Stain in Prussian Blue
Watercolour on canvas (16” x 20”)
DATASET: This work is based on a dataset I created over the course of this project. I used ChatGPT as a design and brainstorming partner across five project stages, reflecting how students often use AI to work through academic tasks. I then wrote a script to estimate the number of tokens used in each stage, separating my tokens from the system’s tokens, and used that total to estimate the total water use of the project.
THOUGHTS: Although the estimated water use for this project was lower than expected (about 1 mL), the data revealed that human tokens were consistently overtaken by system tokens. This complicates common advice that users should be more concise to save resources, as it shifts responsibility onto users rather than onto the systems that control token expenditure.
DATA STORY: The freshwater cost of AI use is complex and often abstract, so I wanted to tell the story of that “cost.” To illustrate this, I used a single glass of Toronto tap water to create a watercolour painting of my data. As the project progressed, the water was slowly taken into the canvas, and the colours darkened, reflecting the progression of both the work and the water being spent. I chose watercolour because once the brush touches the water, it becomes unusable by humans, plants, and animals. Now, as the work hangs dried on the wall, all that remains of the water is a stain in Prussian blue.
Filza Ahmed
Undergraduate, Lassonde School of Engineering
The Shape of Light
Crocheted textile (22” x 16”)
The Shape of Light is a crochet data materialisation of daylight duration over one year in Toronto, Canada (TimeandDate.com). Each row represents one week, with yellow stitches corresponding to the proportion of daylight hours, and blue stitches representing darkness. As the ratio shifts throughout the year, the textile forms a curved pattern that visualizes the seasonal expansion and contraction of light. I chose to work with daylight data because seasonal light strongly affects how I experience time and mood, especially during winter when the sun disappears early and days feel smaller and heavier. I wanted to translate this feeling into a physical object that could be held and experienced. I chose crochet because its slow, repetitive process mirrors the gradual change of daylight from week to week. A small marker indicates the moment the piece was completed, placing the viewer within the ongoing cycle of the year. The project explores how environmental data can be communicated through tactile form. The goal was to show that data is not only analytical, but also emotional and lived.
Farah Baliki
Undergraduate, Lassonde School of Engineering
Prompts and Futures
My work examines a direct relationship between machine and land. Specifically, a machine we mostly use every day, Chat GPT. Ignoring the decline in our cognitive abilities and educational experience as students over the past three years, there still is a huge price to pay for this form of "intelligence" that humans have created. Unlike Google or research articles, when we ask Chat GPT, it generates an answer by fetching data from the web and formulating an answer to your prompt. This accessible and immensely helpful service, although free to users, comes at a greater cost. The process of formulating an answer consumes energy in data centers where servers controlling such chat bots are located. Data centers’ systems are constantly in use, by our overconsumption and overreliance on AI tools, which leads them to require tremendous amounts of water to cool down and stay available consistently. I’ll represent AI's consumption of fresh water by a water pump system. An Arduino microcontroller pumps water out of a container (representing earth’s storage of clean water). It will be interactive with viewers to press a button (send a prompt), over time, a noticeable decline will happen in the main container. Using the following data, the container and the amount of water pumped by each press will be scaled accordingly. Making AI Less "Thirsty": Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models
Ilze Briede
Graduate, Arts, Media, Performance & Design
Tender Concrete
Dried reeds and grasses, wool thread, metal thread, Perspex sheet, 3D- printed PLA (polylactic acid), embossed sticker labels
Tender Concrete is a data-driven artwork informed by archival documents of the Leslie Street Spit construction as a post-war dumping ground during Toronto’s rapid urban expansion. Formed from demolition debris and excavated earth, the peninsula is composed of discarded materials including concrete, brick, stone, soil, sand, gravel, clay, shale, porcelain, tile, asphalt, and steel. Once integral to homes, streets, and civic infrastructure, these materials now form the hidden foundation of a landscape inhabited by plants and wildlife. The work examines rubble as both a material archive and ecological substrate. Materials engineered for stability have gradually softened and rounded through exposure to wind, waves, and plant life, becoming part of an evolving habitat. Weaving is used as method and metaphor. Reeds gathered from the site are interlaced with fabricated elements—3D-printed bricks, rebar, and concrete forms—reconstructed at a smaller scale. Large-scale infrastructural debris and data are transformed into tactile form, allowing the layered histories of the land to be examined through material practice. Neither fully natural nor fully urban, Leslie functions as a hybrid terrain shaped by human activity and ongoing environmental change. The work draws on quantitative data from the Addendum – Tommy Thompson Park Master Plan and Environmental Assessment (1992), which documents material fill from 1959 to 1991 and serves as the primary data source for this materialisation.
Francis Calingo
Graduate, Environmental & Urban Change
Diversity*Suburbia: The Geographies of Filipino Language Speakers in Toronto
Digital (Python, Canva)
Filipinos make up the 4th-largest visible minority group in Toronto (2021 Canadian census). However, their language diversity is not often discussed. This project visualizes the geographic dispersion of the four most-spoken Philippine-based languages by mother tongue (Tagalog, Ilocano, Cebuano, Hiligaynon) in Toronto (2021 Census). Using CHASS Data Centre’s Canadian Census Analyser to expedite data collection of Toronto-based dissemination Areas (DAs), Python for data analysis and mapping visualizations, and Canva for generating this infographic, the geographic distribution of the top 4 Filipino languages spoken is characterized by higher densities in suburban Toronto (especially North York and Scarborough) and some variations in density across each language. For example, while there is a relatively low density of Ilocano and Cebuano speakers in the north-eastern-most area of Toronto, there is a relatively high density of Tagalog and Hiligaynon speakers in that area.
Thalia Godbout
Graduate, Arts, Media, Performance & Design
Battery Rhythm Scarf
The Battery Rhythm Scarf maps my personal phone charging rhythms, visualizing cycles of energy consumption as repetitive rituals of care. As part of our daily routines, the act of charging personal devices becomes disregarded as an immaterial, trivial act to feed our digital habits, removed from the realities of our electronics' ties to land-based resources. In the form of a scarf that was slowly knit by hand, electricity consumption is made visible and tangible as an embodied, temporal map worn around the neck. By mapping the rhythms of my own phone use, the textile also becomes an intimate cyclical map of my own personal bodily rhythms revealed in the ways that I care for my device.
The scarf uses colour to visualize time spent charging and consuming my phone battery across a period of 5 days. Each garter ridge represents a 30-minute time interval, with 48 garter ridges representing a 24-hour time period. The number of coloured stitches across each garter ridge maps to my phone's battery percentage at that time. Green stitches indicate that my phone's battery was charging, and red stitches indicate that its battery was draining.
More information on my process and knitting charts can be found on Ravelry at Battery Rhythm Scarf.
Sven Huycke
Graduate, Environmental & Urban Change
3D Visualization of Forest Stand Metrics Using iPad Pro Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)
Digital
Forest stand metrics are traditionally measured and recorded into non-spatial excel datasheets. This limitation hinders the ability of decision makers and the public to understand data that is being collected regarding forest ecosystems. 3D visualization provides an ease of conceptualization of forest ecosystem processes, changes, dynamics, and an interactive relationship with forests. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) can bridge this gap from non-spatial datasheets to 3D visualization. However, the most commonly applied forms of LiDAR, terrestrial (TLS) and airborne laser scanning (ALS), have high economic entry costs, and require extensive training and certified personal to collect data to effectively produce 3D visualization, creating barriers to their application. In 2020, Apple introduced LiDAR to their iPad and iPhone Pro models, referred to here as iLiDAR. iLiDAR is a lower cost alternative to TLS and ALS, while also representing a user-friendly mobile form of LiDAR. Additionally, iLiDAR over lays its 3D data with photos taken of the environment, providing a colourization and added layer of visualization that TLS and ALS can not provide. The dataset used in this submission is from Canadian Forces Base Borden Forest Research Station in Angus, Ontario. I have collected this data from my study area using iLiDAR. I will develop a workflow with this data to derive forest metrics that would otherwise be collected manually, requiring extensive labour intensive field work.
Lucas Jaramillo
Undergraduate, Arts, Media, Performance & Design
Machine Pollution
Digital
I got my data from Weiwei Zhu on https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/jaderz/whale-sightings-and-occurrence-observations, I chose this data because as machines evolve and continue to spread across the world the most effected animal from this is whales, From head on collisions with large ships to the ingestion of fishing gear. I chose this data because it highlights whale behavior from showing how intelligent and magnificent these animals are, having their own language being able to dive so deep into the sea and showing different behaviors as they surface from the ocean. They are truly beautiful creatures who deserve more than to be polluted and destroyed by the development of machine
Celine Kapshanian
Undergraduate, Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
A Chronology of Land*Machine
Digital
This project is a 60-minute auditory study of a suburban neighborhood, comparing the "soundscapes" of nature trails and urban sidewalks. Using five-minute interval sampling, I captured 30-second audio snippets to analyze the balance between mechanical and natural noise. Moving away from complex oscillograms, the final data visualization uses proportional icons to represent sound sources. The larger the graphic, the more dominant the sound—creating an easy-to-digest visual hierarchy of the environment's acoustic footprint.
Amenan Kouakou
Undergraduate, Arts, Media, Performance & Design
Nature's palette
My project aims to showcase the benefits of horticulture to the land while also showcasing its advantages to people. In order to reflect this, I plan to use various datasets such as horticulture sector reports like these ones, https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/sector/horticulture/reports ,https://www.ontario.ca/document/agriculture-and-food-statistics/horticultural-crops, and other sources with a focus on horticulture's overall benefits , especially towards the soil like these ones.
Jubelle Paa
Graduate, Arts, Media, Performance & Design
lahat ng kurakot dapat managot (jail the corrupt)
"lahat ng kurakot dapat managot" (jail the corrupt) is the chant of the Filipino people in recent protests against the corrupt government misuse of flood-control project money. This piece visualizes the forced displacement of Filipinos due to 2021 super typhoon Odette—each 5-petal sampaguita (jasmine flower) represents 10,000 people while 3-petal flowers represent 1,000 people. Weaved blue regions of the map represent affected areas, with darker blues referring to regions with more affected residents. The weaving is a reflection of Filipino labour and forced resilience. Diskarte (Tagalog for resourcefulness) is reflected in the creation process and reused materials–a napkin, a pillowcase, a curtain, and an old blanket. Clips of news videos of flooding in Philippine cities are projected on the back, drawing attention to the struggles citizens face as a result of the failures of the government.
IOM (2022) Displacement Tracking Matrix Site Assessment Typhoon Rai (Odette) Report No. 1.
Aatif Usmani
Undergraduate, Science
Invisible City - Exposing Toronto's Hidden Chemical Risk
Digital
The Problem
Every year, 700 Toronto industrial facilities release millions of kilograms of chemicals into our environment. This data is public but buried in massive CSV files, invisible to those most affected. I built this website to expose the risk of locations you or your family/friends frequent - whether it’s your home, school, office, favourite restaurant, etc.
Findings
Toronto’s wastewater plants are the highest-risk facilities. Highland Creek releases 11kg of mercury annually—a neurotoxin with no safe exposure level. Ashbridges Bay emits 527kg of lead, damaging children’s developing brains. Carcinogens concentrate near residential areas. I identified 15 facilities releasing formaldehyde, benzene, and hexavalent chromium. The Portlands Energy Centre alone emits 423,461kg of carcinogens annually on Toronto’s waterfront.
Even the U of T Steam Plant exposes 90,000 people daily to over 55,000kg (annual) of respiratory irritants
How I Built It
I developed a full-stack platform combining EPA toxicity frameworks with ensemble ML. Each chemical receives toxicity scores (mercury: 100, lead: 95). Risk calculation: 40% toxicity-weighted exposure + 25% volume + 20% potency + 15% heavy metals. A proximity layer amplifies risk for facilities near schools and hospitals—1km radius receives 2.0x multipliers. Four ML methods detect anomalies (42): Isolation Forest, industry normalization, extreme value detection, and carcinogen-proximity flagging. The React/Mapbox interface lets users search any address for personalized risk scores based on facilities within 5km.
Why This Matters
As a Biochemistry student, I believe environmental data shouldn’t require technical expertise to access. If you can search your home’s value in 10 seconds on Realtor.ca, you should be able to search chemical risk just as easily.
The danger is documented; the choice to look is yours.
Explore: invisible-chem-city.vercel.app | Code: https://github.com/AatifUsmani/Invisible-Chem-City
Neha Valliani
Undergraduate, Arts, Media, Performance & Design
On measuring a good life (2013-2023)
Digital
This audiovisual piece translates ten years of global happiness data into moving images, sound, and
colour. Using data from the World Happiness Report, four indicators of well-being — Happiness
Score, GDP per capita, Healthy Life Expectancy, and Social Support — drive everything you
see and hear.
Each moment in the animation represents one year between 2013 and 2023. As the years progress,
the map shows how countries shift according to their reported well-being. At the same time, the data
is transformed into music and colour, creating a parallel sensory interpretation of the same
information.
How the data shapes the experience:
Music
- Pitch → Happiness score (higher happiness produces higher notes)
- Loudness → Life expectancy (longer lives produce stronger accents)
- Timbre → Social support (stronger support adds richer harmonies)
Colour Field
- Hue → Happiness
- Saturation → Social support
- Brightness → Life expectancy
All visuals and sound are generated directly from real data, with no randomness.
A decade of global happiness translated into map, music, and colour — depicting how
numbers attempt to measure a “good life.”
Exhibitor Note: Each viewer may read those numbers through their own personal experiences and
places in the world.