Public discourse in the Russian blogosphere

The Berkman Center is pleased to announce a new paper analyzing the Russian blogosphere:

Public Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere: Mapping RuNet Politics and Mobilization (PDF) by Bruce Etling, Karina Alexanyan, John Kelly, Rob Faris, John Palfrey, and Urs Gasser

This research was debuted publicly on October 19, 2010, at the United States Institute of Peace.

"Public Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere: Mapping RuNet Politics and Mobilization" is the first release from the Berkman Center's Russian Internet research project. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation, the Berkman Center is undertaking a two-year project to investigate the role of the Internet in Russian society. The study will include a number of interrelated areas of inquiry that contribute to and draw upon the Russian Internet, including the Russian blogosphere, Twitter, and the online media ecology. For more information about the Berkman Center's Russia research, please visit: http://cyber.harvard.edu/research/russia.

For this paper, the authors analyzed Russian blogs to discover networks of discussion around politics and public affairs. Beginning with an initial set of over five million blogs, they used social network analysis to identify a highly active ‘Discussion Core’ of over 11,000. These were clustered according to long term patterns of citations within posts, and the resulting segmentation characterized through both automated and human content analysis. For a list of key findings, an imagine of the RuNet map, and access to the full paper, please visit: http://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2010/Public_Discourse_Russian_Blogosphere.

As always, we welcome your feedback.