1. LABORATORY FOR INTERNET STUDIES 1

2. PEOPLE Olessia Koltsova, Head of laboratory Sergey Nikolenko,
Mathematician,
Senior researcher
Sergei Koltcov,
Physicist, technical director
Peter Meylakhs,
Sociologist,
Senior researcher
Svetlana Bodrunova,
Media scholar,
Invited researcher
Andrey Scherbak,
Political scientist,
Invited researcher
Anastasia Shimorina,
Computer linguist,
Junior researcher
Interdisciplinary team, division of labor. Sociologists should do sociological research
MULTI-GENERATION
Yury Rykov,
PhD student in sociology,
intern
Tatiana Yefimova,
PhD student in political science,
intern
Daria
Yudenkova
Administrative director

3. LAB’S THREE CORNERSTONES
Big Internet data
Diverse methods & tools
Social science research questions and goals
SOCIOLOGY, POLITICAL SCIENCE; WOULD LIKE TO ADD ECONOMICS, MARKETING 3

4. Koltran BLOGMINER mines posts, comments and user metadata
DATA1: LIVEJOURNAL
OUR SOFT WITH OUR PARTNER COMPANY
Koltran BLOGMINER mines posts, comments and user metadata 4

5. DATA2: VKontakte SOCIAL NETWORK
LINIS VKMiner mines friendship egonetworks, friendship networks of VK communities and....
WANT comparative research with other societies & languages 5

6. DATA2: VKontakte SOCIAL NETWORK
…and message boards of VK communities (posts, comments, likes, user metadata).
WANT comparative research with other societies & languages 6

7. TOOLS & METHODS 1 Text mining: topic modeling with LINIS TopicMiner
Screenshot 7

8. Text mining: sentiment analysis
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) 8

9. TOOLS & METHODS 3 Network analysis
Many tools exist, but most do not process data of our scale
Community detection with Louvain source code
Qualitative analysis is crucial for hypothesis setting and interpretation of data 9

10. RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND GOALS 1
Online public agenda: topical structure of the Russian blogosphere and influence of national elections on it
(finished project)
EXAMPLES, NOT ALL GOALS 10

11. 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 11

12. RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND GOALS 3
Comment-based communities, their topical coherence and authorship homogenity
(finished project) 12

13. RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND GOALS 4
Network structure and leadership in VK communities of social movements
Can some network structure predict success/persistence of groups?
Influentials and suscep-tibles in destructive com-munities: perspectives for Internet interventions 13

14. THANK YOU!
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