‘In the End we shall Get a Strong Interdisciplinary Project’

On May 13th and 17th two meetings took place at the HSE –in Moscow and in Saint-Petersburg – HSE representatives met with members of the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

On the HSE side, representatives of various faculties and partner organizations took part in the negotiations. During one of the meetings, the American team delivered a report on the results of a two-year research project into the Russian blogosphere. Two projects were unveiled. The first was a blogosphere map, which is based on the analysis of links between blogs and topical clusters which form the Russian-language blogger community, how large they are and how they are connected with each other. Politically oriented clusters were analyzed as well as those where problems of culture, business and technology are discussed. The second project, the so-called Media Cloud, is software development which lets us determine on the basis of word use frequency analysis which topics are currently most discussed in blogs, and compare them with the topics prevalent in conventional media.

According to Bruce Etling, director of the project and researcher at the Center for Internet and Society, ‘Berkman Center's interest in Russia is not limited by this project;the research carried out in Russia is a part of a larger comparative study on Internet &Democracy, as part of which Farsi-speaking and Arabic-speaking blogospheres have already been investigated.'

Initially, colleagues from Harvard contacted me and asked me to put them in contact with people at the HSE studying the Internet - Olesya Koltsova, Dean of the Faculty of Sociology at the Saint-Petersburg HSE branch, whose collaboration with an associate fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society became a ‘prologue'to the recent meetings, commented - we discussed it with our HSE colleagues and decided to organize a meeting with the participation of Russian sociologists, mathematicians, linguists as well as our partners - pollsters and IT companies developing semantic technologies. Each of them told us about their activities and how their work could enrich or develop the Harvard research, and offered their comments on our guests'project. As a result, U.S. researchers have not only received a broad academic response to their work, but seen that we are able to quickly gather an interdisciplinary team ready to start working. In Harvard each faculty is autonomous, and, according to the colleagues from the Berkman Center, our speed and responsiveness impressed them.'

The Saint-Petersburg meeting which was initially aimed at getting the guests familiar with young researchers and postgraduates grew into business negotiations with the participation of Robert Faris, Research Director at the Berkman Center, and Daniil Alexandrov, Deputy Director for Research at the HSE Saint-Petersburg branch.

The parties outlined the first steps as well as the prospects for developing cooperation. ‘The best beginning for this cooperation will be the joint work of Bruce Etling, Olesya Koltsova and Karina Aleksanyan on the methods of encoding Russian blogs - Robert Faris said - and in the process of this work we will have the opportunity to choose topics discussed in blogs which are of interest for both sides for detailed joint investigation.'

‘This work is very promising - commented Daniil Alexandrov - We have long wanted to set up a collaboration between sociologists, linguists and analytics-mathematicians in the area of quantitative processing of large data arrays, and the interest from Harvard colleagues catalyzed this. The most promising idea is to create blog clusters not on the basis of links between them, but according to the contents which will be analyzed automatically, by means of mathematical and linguistic tools;and then together with the colleagues from Harvard to compare these results with their Russian internet map. But now we are not making guesses for the future, we are gradually building on the potential joint work starting with interaction on the contents. Olesya Koltsova has already built scientific relationships with Harvard researchers, and she will be responsible for further cooperation. I believe that in the end we will have a strong interdisciplinary project.'

‘Even if these meetings don't to any specific agreements - Elena Penskaya, HSE Professor Ordinarius, Deputy Head of the School of Business and Political Journalism and co-organizer of the Moscow meeting, said - it's not so important, since these meetings have acted as an impulse to get together and start planning joint work in the area of Internet research. As a matter of fact, we had already discussed the idea itself, and the visit of Harvard colleagues proved that we were on the right path.'

Photos by Polina Frolova