Geospatial data analysis in Russia’s geoweb

The chapter examines the role of geospatial data in Russia’s online ecosystem. Facilitated by the rise of geographic information systems and user-generated content, the distribution of geospatial data has blurred the line between physical spaces and their virtual representations. The chapter discusses different sources of these data available for Digital Russian Studies (e.g., social data and crowdsourced databases) together with the novel techniques for extracting geolocation from various data formats (e.g., textual documents and images). It also scrutinizes different ways of using these data, varying from mapping the spatial distribution of social and political phenomena to investigating the use of geotag data for cultural practices’ digitization to exploring the use of geoweb for narrating individual and collective identities online

Étudier les représentations des paysages sur les réseaux sociaux

Cet article étudie les représentations des paysages véhiculées par les sites de partage en ligne. Il propose une méthodologie originale reposant sur l’analyse de similitude issue de la psychologie sociale. En appliquant cette méthodologie au cas de la Camargue, l’auteur montre que les représentations numériques des paysages retrouvent les ancrages culturels locaux, en dépit du caractère territorialement désenchassé de la pratique numérique. Il montre également le rôle joué par certains milieux naturels dans l’articulation de représentations sociales hétérogènes.This article examines representations of landscapes disseminated by online image sharing sites. It proposes an original methodology based on the analysis of similarities used in social psychology. By applying this methodology in the case of Camargue, the author demonstrates that the digital representations of landscapes can reconnect with local cultural roots, in spite of the fact that by nature they are disconnected from the territory. He also describes the role played by certain natural environments in associations of heterogeneous social representations

Categorizing events using spatio-temporal and user features from Flickr

Even though the problem of event detection from social media has been well studied in recent years, few authors have looked at deriving structured representations for their detected events. We envision the use of social media for extracting large-scale structured event databases, which could in turn be used for answering complex (historical) queries. As a key stepping-stone towards this goal, we introduce a method for discovering the semantic type of extracted events, focusing in particular on how this type is influenced by the spatio-temporal grounding of the event, the profile of its attendees, and the semantic type of the venue and other entities which are associated with the event. We estimate the aforementioned characteristics from metadata associated with Flickr photos of the event and then use an ensemble learner to identify its most likely semantic type. Experimental results based on an event dataset from Upcoming.org and Last.fm show a marked improvement over bag-of-words based methods

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today