Correction to: The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

This book was inadvertently published with an incorrect affiliation for the Author Mikhail Kopotev. The affiliation has now been amended in the book.

Run Runet Runaway: The Transformation of the Russian Internet as a Cultural-Historical Object

The history of Runet is not just a chronological account of the major events in the Russian Internet space. We take a historical approach in order to identify the boundaries of Runet as an object of investigation. This chapter offers a framework for the examination of Runet as a constantly changing socio-technical object. Due to the participatory nature of its continuous construction, Runet has been addressed as a “runaway object” (Engeström, 2008). In order to follow the development of this “runaway Runet,” we identify and follow five interrelated vectors: the technological vector, the cultural vector, the media vector, the user vector and the political vector. This allows us not only to describe the history of Runet but also to contribute to an understanding of what it is and whether there is an “end to Runet.”

Digital Art: A Sourcebook of Ideas for Conceptualizing New Practices, Networks and Modes of Self-Expression

The chapter traces the evolution of digital art produced in the Russian Federation and in the Russian language by critically considering a number of case studies and re-conceptualizing historical periods. It takes into account technologies, institutions, individual artists and artistic networks, and modes of presentation, appreciation and re-contextualization. It contributes to the debates about the nature and focus of art in the digital era by assessing historical, economic and creative factors. It showcases how digital art might be understood as a particular medium, platform, network, aesthetic and function, and it also argues that digital art does not fit into those categories. Instead notions of transformation, scope and duration are used to account for new forms of artistic expression.

Studying Ideational Change in Russian Politics with Topic Models and Word Embeddings

This chapter applies computational methods of textual analysis to a large corpus of media texts to study ideational change. The empirical focus of the chapter is on the ideas of the political role of innovation, technology, and economic development that were introduced into Russian politics during Medvedev’s presidency. The chapter uses topic modeling, shows the limitations of the method, and provides a more nuanced analysis with the help of word embeddings. The latter method is used to analyze semantic change and to capture complex semantic relationships between the studied concepts.

Russia’s Digital Economy Program: An Effective Strategy for Digital Transformation?

This chapter focuses on the state program “Digital Economy of the Russian Federation” (2017) and its subsequent transformation into the national project (2018) to be implemented from 2018 to 2024. It examines the effectiveness of the government’s strategy in this area and provides an analysis of the program’s content in terms of its main objectives and mechanisms of implementation, drawing on the constructive criticism of the program in the literature. It also reviews the history of the development of the program, main actors involved in its design and implementation, and the nature of the decision-making process.

Digital Russia Studies: An Introduction

The “digital” is profoundly changing Russia today. In this introduction, we argue that area studies, as a geographically and geopolitically motivated interdisciplinary research domain, is of particular value to and can provide a framework for describing the variety of responses to digitalization and explaining the mechanisms that assist or obstruct the “domestication” of global trends. Making a case for “Digital Russia Studies”, we sketch the contours of this emerging field. “Digital Russia” studies focuses on the digital transformation of the (geographical) area of study, while digital “Russia Studies” indicates the use of digital sources and methods in studying it. Together, Digital Russia Studies emphasizes how these two research lines are intertwined, interdependent, and mutually reinforcing. An overview of topics and methods covered by the chapters in the volume is provided.

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.

Personal Data Protection in Russia

This chapter considers the legal framework of data protection in Russia. The adoption of the Yarovaya laws, data localization requirement, and enactment of sovereign Runet regulations allowing for isolation of the internet in Russia paint a grim representation of state control over data flows in Russia. Upon closer examination, it can be seen that the development of data protection in Russia follows many of the steps taken at the EU level, although some EU measures violated fundamental rights and were invalidated. Specific rules in this sphere in Russia are similar to the European General Data Protection Regulation. This chapter shows the special role of Roskomnadzor in forming data protection regulations by construing vaguely defined rules of legislation.

Social Media-based Research of Interpersonal and Group Communication in Russia

Rapidly proliferating social media not only serve as a new channel of human communication but also open up research opportunities to ask a wider set of questions about political, sociological and psychological factors that influence interpersonal and group online communication, development and maintenance of personal networks and the growth or decline of social capital. In this chapter we discuss the research opportunities provided by new survey, observational and experimental data that may be obtained from a social networking site. For doing so, we refer to Russian-language social networking sites (SNS) or SNS segments, notably VKontakte as the most popular SNS in Russia. We demonstrate how the aforementioned types of data may or have already been used to address research tasks from a number of disciplines.

From Samizdat to New Sincerity. Digital Literature on the Russian-Language Internet

Digital literature on the Russian-language Internet includes a broad variety of phenomena, from online libraries to writers’ blogs, from hypertext to Internet memes. The chapter begins by clarifying the terms “digital literature” and “Runet,” drawing on a functional understanding of literature in the tradition of Russian Formalism. It embeds Runet literary studies into global contexts and gives an overview of essential phenomena (hypertext, fan fiction, blogging) and narratives. It analyzes local discourses, which, in turn, attempt to make sense of global communication technologies, for example, by conceptualizing digital self-publishing as samizdat, that is, the historical phenomenon of clandestine underground publication in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. The chapter concludes with an overview of research approaches and methods, both qualitative and quantitative, and of the challenges that future analysis will face.