The breath of the Blogosphere. LINIS Seminar in Moscow

On April 24, 2012, the LINIS team conducted the seminar "The breath of the Blogosphere? Methods for Analysing Big Internet Data Corpora for Sociological Tasks". The talk took place as a part of the academic seminar on sociological theory and methodology, organized by the HSE’s Analysis of Social Institutions Department (headed by Inna Deviatko) together with the Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology (headed by Vadim Radaev), Moscow.

Maslinsky_1

On April 24, 2012, the LINIS team conducted the seminar "The breath of the Blogosphere? Methods for Analysing Big Internet Data Corpora for Sociological Tasks". The talk took place as a part of the academic seminar on sociological theory and methodology, organized by the HSE’s Analysis of Social Institutions Department (headed by Inna Deviatko) together with the Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology (headed by Vadim Radaev), Moscow.

Olessia Koltsova, head of LINIS, described methods developed in the Lab for the collection and automated analysis of posts and comments in LiveJournal. The tasks where these methods are applied include determining a blog’s topical structure, the structure of discussions, and then social tensions and prerequisites for social mobilization.

Koltsov_Moskva

Sergey Koltsov spoke on the automated collection and formation of valid samples that meet the requirements of a sociological study (using KoltranBlogminer Laboratory software), and on the problems of calculating limitations when working with big datasets.

Koltsova_Moskva

Olessia Koltsova and Kirill Maslinsky spoke on the application of cluster analysis algorithms to large text corpora and algorithms to identify topics (for example,  LDA with Stanford Topic Modeling Toolbox). Julia Pavlova’s presentation on the problems of determining emotional tensions around topics (using sentiment analysis methods with SentiStrength software) concluded the seminar.

Deviatko_1

Scholars from various fields, such as sociology economics, linguistics, mathematics, and political science, were guests at the seminar. The Lab’s presentation was intended to beinterdisciplinary,  innovative, and provocative Since it covered not only methodological results but also problems, the presentations elicited a lively discussion that included many questions, as well as comments and feedback on the Lab’s work.  LINIS promised to come to Moscow again and present not only methodological results but also empirical findings. 

Materials and video from the seminar can be found in the "Materials" section.