School of Social and Political Science

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School of Social and Political Science (SPS) academic Christopher Barrie has won a University of Edinburgh award for innovative digital research on political reporting data. Three other SPS academics were recognised with Highly Commended awards at the Centre for Data, Culture and Society’s (CDCS) Digital Research Prizes. 

The CDCS Digital Research Prizes recognise excellent data-led projects and activities across the University of Edinburgh’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS). They are awarded to examples of digital research that show creativity, excellence and impact, and that model best practice in the use and sharing of data.  

Christopher Barrie, Lecturer in Computational Sociology at SPS, received the prize in the category Best Novel Use of a Digital Method for his project Measuring Media Freedom with Word Embeddings, which he completed with colleagues Neil Ketchley (University of Oxford), Alexandra Siege (University of Colorado) and Mossaab Bagdouri (BagTek, Morocco).  

The team used the largest existing dataset of Arabic-language news to evaluate how political reporting about the government changes over the course of successful and failed democratic transitions in Egypt and Tunisia. They developed a new method to produce media freedom scores by combining collections of news media with tools from natural language processing. The project points to new possibilities in the monitoring and measurement of media freedom within key political settings. 

Read Measuring Media Freedom here.

Aybuke Atalay, a PhD student in Politics and International Relations, and Tod Van Gunten, Lecturer in Economic Sociology, received Highly Commended in the category Best Visualisation for their project output Global Diffusion of Songs on Spotify. The output uses daily global rankings data from Spotify to analyse processes of cultural globalisation in music.This is part of a larger project, Music Streaming as Global Cultural Diffusion, which aims to understand the social processes through which cultural objects such as songs reach global audiences.

Find out more about the Global Diffusion of Songs of Spotify project here.

Additionally, Science Technology and Innovation Studies PhD student Lara Dal Molin received Highly Commended in the category Best Novel Use of a Digital Method. Her project is Incorporating Queer Epistemologies in an Open-Source Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) Language Model: A Pilot Study. This study attempts to construct a methodology to include diverse personalities in AI. This autumn, Lara will be running five workshops inspired by the study. 

Congratulations to all involved in the prizewinning and Highly Commended projects!