CDCS Digital Research Prizes Awards Ceremony 2023
On the 24th May we celebrated the amazing research being done by members of the CDCS community at our annual Digital Research Prizes award ceremony. The CDCS prizes are designed to recognise the excellent data-led projects and activities going on across CAHSS and to help foster a supportive, collaborative community. We were delighted to receive nominations from an array of subject areas this year, showcasing a whole host of digital methods within the arts and humanities. It was also great to have the opportunity to network and catch up with colleagues over lunch.
Founding director Melissa Terras presented the awards to the winning nominees, they are as follows:
Best Data Visualisation
Winner
Ukraine Data Tracker - Christine Bell, Sarah Schöttler and Jinrui Wang
The Ukraine Data Tracker consists of an interactive map of the ongoing conflict and an actor profile for Russia using data from the PA-X Peace Agreements Database. Taken together, these visualisations show the ongoing conflict and the characteristics of the key country driving the armed conflict.
Highly Commended
Global Diffusion of Songs on Spotify - Tod Van Gunten and Aybuke Atalay
The Global Diffusion of Songs on Spotify is an animated visualisation of the global spread of songs on Spotify. It shows how many countries a song has reached the top 200 and how the evolution of that trajectory changes over time.
Best Small Data-Driven Project
Winner
A Spring Ahead - Jenny Long, Jiamei Huang and Michaella Yosephine
"A Spring Ahead" simulates how rising temperatures affect UK’s spring tritrophic phenologies based on data from Nature’s Calendar, Met Office, and research by Burgess et al. (2018). Each phenology is portrayed as small acrylic pieces. Overlapping pieces depict matching phenologies. Over the pieces, lies a transparent disc with a quarter gap that shows ecological spring duration. Surrounding the pieces is a fixed, circular 365- day calendar meant to show the rigidity of our concept of time.
Highly Commended
The Economic Impact of the Menopause - Bee French
This project seeks to quantify the economic impact of the menopause. Specifically, it analyses the relationship between the nature and severity of menopausal symptoms and women’s workplace performance in the current UK labour force. It also investigates the wider economic implications of this.
Best Dataset
Winner
PA-X Peace Agreements Database and Dataset (sixth release) - Christine Bell, Sanja Badanjak, Laura Wise, Robert Wilson, Juline Beaujouan, Adam Farquhar and Jennifer Hodge
The PA-X Peace Agreements Database and Dataset is currently the most expansive collection of peace agreements data in the world and features an archive of agreement texts in pdf format, a corpus of agreement texts (all translated into English by translators with expertise in law, legal studies, or countries from which the agreements originated), a human-coded dataset that covers agreement metadata and 230 substantive categories of issues covered in agreement texts.
Best Impact from a Data-Led Project
Joint Winner
Building a comprehensive database of Scottish food policies - Claire Perier
With this project Claire Perier aims to establish a comprehensive portfolio of data related to Scottish food policy that can support the transition towards a fair, healthy and sustainable food system. This work, together with SFC’s wider advocacy efforts, were essential in securing unanimous parliamentary support for the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Bill, driven by a heightened awareness of the need for a joined-up approach and links between local and national levels.
Joint Winner
Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Culture and Collections and Assassin’s Creed Mirage - Glaire Anderson, Sarah Slingluff and Deniz Vural
The partnership of the Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Cultures and Collections (DLIVCC) and Ubisoft, Assassin's Creed Mirage team, allowed for the DLIVCC to work with leading global video game publisher Ubisoft to make Islamic art and history accessible to a wide public audience in the UK and around the globe. This project serves as a significant case study for meaningful collaboration and knowledge transfer between the education, video games, and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) sectors.
Best Novel Use of a Digital Method
Winner
Measuring Media Freedom with Word Embeddings - Christopher Barrie, Neil Ketchley, Alexandra Siegel and Mossaab Bagdouri
This work innovates in elaborating a new way of measuring media freedom in authoritarian settings using text data alone. The method is wholly unsupervised and therefore scalable to industry to provide granular and responsive measures of media freedom. Data from over 35 million news articles across Egypt and Tunisia over a ten year period was used and it was shown that the embeddings-based measure correlates very closely to expert survey coder estimations from the widely used Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) index.
Highly Commended
The Aesthetics of Agency: Care Identity & Interactive Storytelling - John Morrison
This research focuses on investigating new modalities of experience with lens-based technologies for communicating somatic, emotional qualitative data co-created with care experienced communities to audiences. The ongoing research explores the exciting intersections of performative arts and emergent, immersive technologies in the process and material practice of meaning-making with stigmatised communities.
Highly Commended
Incorporating Queer Epistemologies in an Open-Source Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) Language Model: a Pilot Study - Lara Dal Molin
The objective of this project is to propose a hybrid, qualitative-quantitative methodology to incorporate queer epistemologies and address gender bias in an open-source Generative Pretrained Transformer Language Model.
The breadth and quality of the nominations was outstanding and we relish the opportunity to showcase the innovative, collaborative, and high quality, data-led work being done across CAHSS. Find out about the winning projects here. Stay tuned for more information on our winning projects on our website and social media channels.
Event photography by Gintare Kulyte.