LABORATORY FOR INTERNET STUDIES
PEOPLE Peter Meylakhs, Sociologist, Senior researcher Sergei Koltcov, Physicist, technical director Svetlana Bodrunova, Media scholar, Invited researcher Tatiana Yefimova, PhD student in political science, intern Andrey Scherbak, Political scientist, Invited researcher Yury Rykov, PhD student in sociology, intern Daria Yudenkova Administrative director Sergey Nikolenko, Mathematician, Senior researcher Olessia Koltsova, Head of laboratory Anastasia Shimorina, Computer linguist, Junior researcher
LABS THREE CORNERSTONES Big Internet data Diverse methods & tools Social science research questions and goals
DATA1: LIVEJOURNAL Koltran BLOGMINER mines posts, comments and user metadata
DATA2: VKontakte SOCIAL NETWORK LINIS VKMiner mines friendship egonetworks, friendship networks of VK communities and....
DATA2: VKontakte SOCIAL NETWORK …and message boards of VK communities (posts, comments, likes, user metadata).
TOOLS & METHODS 1 Text mining: topic modeling with LINIS TopicMiner Screenshot
TOOLS & METHODS 2 Text mining: sentiment analysis Russian language tools still need to be developed Sentiment lexicon will be constructed and tested with SentiStregth (Thelwall)
TOOLS & METHODS 3 Network analysis Many tools exist, but most do not process data of our scale Community detection with Louvain source code
RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND GOALS 1 Online public agenda: topical structure of the Russian blogosphere and influence of national elections on it (finished project)
RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND GOALS 3 Online public opinion: revealing topics that arouse social tension through sentiment analysis (pilot project finished; main project planned) Neanderthals are now in your backyard (a picture from a blog post concerning Muslims slaughtering sheep for Kurban-Bayram in Moscow
RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND GOALS 3 Comment-based communities, their topical coherence and authorship homogenity (finished project)
RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND GOALS 4 Network structure and leadership in VK communities of social movements Influentials and suscep- tibles in destructive com- munities: perspectives for Internet interventions
THANK YOU! Text