Announcing the 2022 Table Contest

We are excited to announce that the 2022 Table Contest starts today! This is the third year we’ve run this event, and we are in awe of this community’s talent. We have been blown away by past submissions and can’t wait to see what you do this year.

This contest aims to highlight the many great ways people transform and present data. Open source data science works better the more people contribute, and we particularly appreciate this community’s openness and generosity in sharing the code and methods you use to create beautiful, useful tables.

Quick Summary

• Deadline for submissions is Friday, November 18th, 2022.
• Submit at rstd.io/table-contest.
• How to submit your table to the contest (video).
• How to create a table in R or Python with Quarto and share it with the world on Quarto Pub (video).

Table Contest: 2022 Edition

No doubt you’ve felt the love for tables that we have here. They serve as a fantastic means to communicate information, both quantitative and qualitative. We really saw that in the previous two editions of the Table Contest, where all entries were of high quality. The entries used a variety of different R packages for generating tables, they were imaginative, and they were very interesting to read. We’ve also seen beautiful examples of tables produced in R shared on social media, and we were similarly blown away by them. Because we can’t get enough of your well-put-together work, we’re announcing the Table Contest of 2022. It will run from now to November 18th, 2022.

We’ve seen time and again how the community is open and generous in sharing the code and process needed to solve problems. We appreciate seeing it because it lets others learn, gets communication going, and strengthens the community. Hopefully, this year’s contest will provide more opportunities for sharing and education. We, in turn, want to recognize and celebrate all the ways people work with and display data in R.

Contest Judging Criteria

Tables will be judged based on technical merit and artistic design. We recognize that some tables may excel in one of these categories, with some in the other (and some in both). We promise that the evaluation will keep this in mind. We also expect your entry to be well documented, with text to help readers understand your motivation, goals, data sources, process, and code.

The maintainers of many of the community’s most popular packages and libraries for building tables, including gt, reactable, gtExtras, and more, will help in judging this year’s winners.

Special Recognition For Novice Contributors

This year we have an ‘Experience’ field, indicating whether or not you just got started with analytics. We will reserve a set of prizes and special recognition for the best submissions from these individuals or teams.

Special Recognition For Industry-Specific Tables

We’ve heard from the community that they’d love to see how others in their own field approach similar work. We’ve therefore included an industry/field tag. We will give special recognition to the top submissions in major fields.

R & Python Tables

This year we are happy to invite tables built with Python. In past years we’ve focused exclusively on data display tables made in R, but so many of us work primarily in Python. We’d love to see how you approach building beautiful tables with Python and integrating Python with JavaScript table libraries.

We do request you create your entry with Quarto. To learn more about how to publish with Quarto from RStudio, JupyterLab, VS Code, or a notebook, see Using Python on quarto.org. Alternatively, we do accept your notebook rendered in GitHub.

Requirements

To produce your final table, every submission must include all the code, data, and processing steps.

• Code: A link to the repository that fully reproduces your submission.
• Table: A link to your published table, for example, on your personal website, Quarto Pub, shinyapps.io, etc.
• RStudio.cloud project: To aid reproducibility, we request all entries include a cloud project where possible.

A submission can use any table-making package available in R or supporting library in Python, and there are lots of them (DT, gt, flextable, kableExtra, reactable, huxtable, etc.).

Submission Types – We are looking for two main types of table submissions:

1. Single Table Example: This may highlight interesting structuring of content, useful and tricky features – for example, enabling interaction – or serve as an example of a common table popular in a specific field. Please document your code for clarity.
2. Tutorial: It’s all about teaching us how to craft an excellent table or understand a package’s features. This may include several tables and narrative.
3. Other: For submissions that do not easily fit into one of the types above. An example here may be a high-level, thoughtful exploration of good table design.

Category – Given that tables have different features and purposes, we’d also like you to categorize the submission table. There are four categories (static-HTML, interactive-HTML, static-print, interactive-Shiny), simply choose the one that best fits your table.

You can submit your entry for the contest by filling out the form at rstd.io/table-contest. The form will generate a post on RStudio Community, which you can then edit further if you like. You may make multiple entries.

The deadline for submissions is November 18th, 2022, at midnight Pacific Time.

Prizes

Grand Prize – In addition to the prizes below, any number of RStudio and Posit t-shirts, books, mugs, and other swag (worth up to $200). ¹

Runners Up – In addition to below, one year of shinyapps.io Basic plan or one year of RStudio.cloud Premium.

Honorable Mentions – A larger-than-large helping of hexagon-shaped stickers for RStudio packages plus a side of hex for table-making packages (and other goodies).

Table Gallery

Previous Table Contests entries have been collected into the Table Gallery. This resource collects and shares examples of beautiful data science tables that explore custom styling and interactivity, and include reproducible code and narrative. Winners and top entries will be invited to be featured in the gallery.

1. Please note that we may not be able to send t-shirts, books, or other items larger than stickers to non-US addresses for which shipping and customs costs are high. ↩︎