Documenting and preserving projects of Russian resistance to war
Imani Chambers
Undergraduate Researcher
Political Science Major (College of Arts & Sciences)
Jessica Thompson
Undergraduate Researcher
Individualized Major Major (Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, & Engineering)
Inna Kouper
Faculty Mentor
Inna Kouper (Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering)
Project Description
In February 2022 Russian Federation has invaded the sovereign country of Ukraine. In addition to military action, the Russian government suppressed any remaining freedom of speech in Russia, banned many digital platforms and social media, and introduced legislation that includes imprisonment for the expression of antiwar sentiment. Despite these severe restrictions, there are attempts among Russian citizens to form grassroots horizontal networks. They use a variety of available digital tools to organize and disseminate information. Preserving their digital activity is vital both from the historical perspective and for understanding practices of resistance in the context of severe repression of freedom. This project has two goals: 1) identify suitable techniques of digital preservation of multimodal digital content, and 2) perform preliminary analysis of the preserved content. The first goal will require good search and evaluation skills and interest in web / social media archiving. The second goal will require willingness to learn and practice content analysis and/or natural language processing techniques. Interest in Eastern Europe and Russia is a plus.
Technology or Computational Component
The technological component includes learning about the technologies of digital preservation and analysis of social media and applying them to the collected materials. Students may be required to subscribe to various social media channels and monitor them over time. This is not a heavily computational or technological project, but it will involve working with various digital platforms and content. If interested, students will be encouraged to learn various programming / data processing techniques.