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

LAB’S 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 2011-2012 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