The CDCS Digital Research Prizes are an opportunity to celebrate and share the excellent work being done by researchers across CAHSS. After the success of last year's inaugural Digital Research Prizes, we invited nominations again for 2023. We asked our community to put forward data-led projects and activities that show creativity, excellence and impact and which model best practice in the use and sharing of data. We’re delighted to showcase the winning projects here and impressed by the range of incredible work across so many different subject areas, from law to sociology, art to philosophy!
CDCS Digital Research Prizes 2023
Winner
Ukraine Data Tracker
"The Ukraine Data Tracker offers a haunting visualisation of the ongoing conflict, readily making apparent the devastating scale of the war. This valuable resource will be used by both researchers and lay people, the depth of information contained within made accessible with an easy to use interface."
"An easy and user-friendly tool that could be tailored to focus on different aspects of the analysed phenomenon. Also, a very timely project that could help users in visualising an ongoing issue"
Highly Commended
Winner
A Spring Ahead
"This small project has been used to shed a thought-provoking light on an aspect of the climate crisis few are aware of. The project's results are startling and have wide ranging implications for our understanding of how ecosystems are responding to global heating, with ready potential to scale up the study and apply across different biomes."
Highly Commended
Winner
PA-X Peace Agreements Database and Dataset (sixth release)
"This expansive dataset is more relevant than ever, serving to remind us that peaceful resolutions are still possible in a world increasingly ravaged by conflict. The extraordinary breadth of data gathered here offers the tools for future peacemakers to learn from and apply past successes to current resolutions."
Joint Winners
Building a comprehensive database of Scottish food policies
"As the cost of living crisis continues to impact across the country, our relationship with food, its cost, and its impact on the planet, is ever more relevant. The Food Policy Database's holistic approach has seen it play a key role in the creation of new government legislation that will transform the way Scotland engages with food."
Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Culture and Collections and Assassin's Creed Mirage
"Of all the submissions this project had the clearest case for large impact, in my opinion."
"This project is subtley reframing millions of peoples' understanding of Islamic culture - really significant in terms of impact."
Winner
Measuring Media Freedom with Word Embeddings
"This is a well-grounded and methodologically innovative study of an important and timely topic."
"An important and innovative research contribution - impressed by the way in which the project developed something scalable, and cost effective that can be used more widely."
Highly Commended
The Aesthetics of Agency: Care Identity & Interactive Storytelling
Highly Commended
Incorporating Queer Epistemologies in an Open-Source Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) Language Model: a Pilot Study