Digital Culture and Media’s Dr Karli Brittz has won the award for best Digital Humanities Visualisation in the recently announced Humanities and Social Science Awards for 2021.

The Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Awards is a platform that focuses on unearthing new voices and finding South African stories that cast a light on us as a nation. The awards, now in their sixth year, are run by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and are open to South African publishers, scholars based in South African universities and independent artists linked to universities. In the past six years, the HSS Awards have adjudicated over the literary merit of over 350 fiction and non-fiction books, and more than 120 digital and creative pursuits like exhibition catalogues, musical composition/arrangement, performance, and visual art. This year’s HSS Awards took place (physically at and virtually from) the Maropeng Cradle of Humankind on 31 March 2021.

The award for best Digital Humanities Visualisation was awarded to Karli Brittz’s project: ‘Insta-dog: computing Instagram’s companion species’. As part of her PhD thesis (supervised by Prof Amanda du Preez), Karli developed ‘Insta-dog’, a digital humanities project that investigates images of dogs posted on social media site Instagram, using a mix of computational, quantitative and theoretical methods. It assembles a close and distant reading of so-called ‘dogstagrams’ examined over three years and includes digital visualisations of a dataset of 6 000 images. The HSS awards said that the project “within its community of practice, no doubt; … will be a conversation starter and be used as a yardstick to discuss new theories and methodologies within its field”.

For Karli, the success of the project is widely due to UP’s postgraduate programme Digital Culture and Media Studies, recently established at the University of Pretoria. The programme encourages students to ask questions about what it means to be human (and dog!) in the digital age. Moreover, it allows students to not only engage with digital content on a theoretical level but also immerse themselves in a virtual realm. In this way, digital and computational visualisations and projects, such as ‘Insta-dog’, are created, which furthers the discourse and critical analysis of digital content. “A shift towards digital humanities allowed me to study the affective relation between man and animal using new technologies, which has given the project and my research its strength,” said Karli.

Supervisor and digital humanities expert Prof Amanda du Preez agrees. “The project allows for cross-disciplinary access to academic research and has led to significant engagement and visibility for the field of digital culture and media studies, as well as the discourse on social media―it showcases the importance of the digital humanities and the potential of future projects within the Digital Culture and Media programme.”

Applications for a Master’s / PHD in Digital Culture and Media are now open.