Svetlana BodrunovaSaint Petersburg State University | SPBU · Department of Mass Media Management
Svetlana Bodrunova
Professor - Doctor of Political Science
The Center for International Media Research that I lead is open to collaborations!
About
74
Publications
7,937
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
454
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Svetlana S. Bodrunova currently works at School of Journalism and Mass Communications, St. Petersburg State University, Russia. Svetlana does research in human-computer interaction, computing in social science, social media and inter-ethnic conflicts, and Russian media and public sphere. She has authored and co-authored over 100 academic works and leads the Center for International Media Research at her School. She serves on editorial boards of four international communications journals.
Additional affiliations
September 2016 - January 2019
Publications
Publications (74)
The study examines the cumulative impact of factors that affect usability testing for user-centered web design, namely the so-called ‘contextual fidelity model’ factors that include product properties, task features, user traits, and environment/context factors. Today, the design, user experience and usability (DUXU) research experiences a lack of...
In this research, the authors consider methods for identifying geodata of users of social networks within user discussions. The knowledge of user geolocation data makes it possible to analyze the spread of discussion among users of different countries. Authors do not try to determine the exact geolocation, but rather the country where the users are...
This Special Issue of Future Internet features the best papers from the 9th annual conference “Comparative Media Studies in Today’s World (CMSTW’2021)”, which was held between 20 and 21 April 2021, in St [...]
Six years after the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, the European Union remains divided on questions of migration and asylum policy. The issue also remains high on the agendas of the USA and Russia, two other key destination countries with immigration from Latin America and the Post-Soviet space. This article presents results from a comparative...
For over 20 years, Russia has been within the top five most attractive countries for immigrants. Before the pandemic, the federal policies that stimulated the immigration of cheap workforce contradicted the public perception and the media coverage of immigrants as problematic communities. Unlike labor immigrants, the EU refugees from the Middle Eas...
The proposed study examines the simultaneous influence of factors (environment, type of task, and product properties) upon functional user states that critically affect assessor performance during the realization of various online tasks. In addition, test environment format varies as individual vs. group one, to assess whether testing conditions af...
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought along an unprecedented amount of social fear and uncertainty. The infodemic has spurred the spread of distrust to elites and their rationality, as well as an outburst of conspiracy theories, around the world. Most studies that investigate the relations between trust to social institutions and public perception of t...
The paper suggests a new conceptualization of deliberation, namely cumulative deliberation, and makes a critical meta-review of the recent studies of cumulative deliberation made by a group of St.Petersburg scholars in 2019–2021. The concept is based on the idea of tug-of-war-like cumulation of opinion, mostly in online discussions; it aggregates c...
ive summarization is a technique that allows for extracting condensed meanings from long texts, with a variety of potential practical applications. Nonetheless, today’s abstractive summarization research is limited to testing the models on various types of data, which brings only marginal improvements and does not lead to massive practical employme...
In web usability studies, a ‘contextual fidelity’ model identifies four factors that significantly affects testing accuracy: web aesthetics; testing environment and circumstances; participants’ personality traits and user states; and the nature of test task. In most works, these factors are considered independent; however, this has never been prope...
This paper presents the perspectives on reporting on migrants and refugees in the Middle East and
North Africa (MENA), Asia, the Americas and the Russian Federation. It is intended to show that
the topic of reporting on migration and forced displacement is by no means settled with existing
publications, first of all the UNESCO Handbook for Journali...
The community-based structure of communication on social networking sites has long been a focus of scholarly attention. However, the problem of discovery and description of hidden communities, including defining the proper level of user aggregation, remains an important problem not yet resolved. Studies of online communities have clear social impli...
YouTube-based discussions are a growing area of academic attention. However, we still lack knowledge on whether YouTube provides for forming critical publics in countries with no established democratic tradition. To address this question, we study commenting to Belarusian oppositional YouTube blogs in advance of the major wave of Belarusian post-el...
The special issue focuses on the roles of socially mediated communication in expressing, aggregating, and shaping political dissent and discontent in Russia and Belarus at the borderline between the 2010s and 2020s. Lately, these post-Soviet countries have demonstrated the growth of restrictive trends in both politics and the public sphere reciproc...
Implementation of user comments created a new phase in audience participation. However, high expectations on rational, responsible, and civil user commenting have quickly vanished. Online, people want to interact with others, to express their opinion on the problem, and to teach others. Thus, recent studies criticize the quality of discussions form...
Agendas in online media have become a scholarly focus nearly two decades ago, leading to shifting conceptualizations of what we see as agenda. Thus, agendas and agenda shifts inside online discussions have shown its potential to influence offline deliberation, aggregate support, fuel protest, passing through and/or bypassing traditional media’s gat...
Objectives: Social media have become a place where the bulk of grassroots political discussion takes place. Today, the growing body of research is dedicated to cumulative patterns on online deliberation, the predecessors of which were the concept of the spiral of silence, the silent majority hypothesis, and influencer studies. However, when applied...
Russian-speaking diaspora has spread across the world during the last century and plays a significant role in cultural and political life of the host countries. But its virtual presence remains heavily understudied; it is only Russian-speaking news websites that have received some scholarly attention. This study aims at estimating the globality of...
Today’s studies of networked discussions may be divided into theory-driven and data-driven, but both lines of research neglect the role of contextual knowledge in assessment of real-world public discourse. As scholars note, without context, data lose meaning and value; however, there is a striking vacuum of scholarly discussion on how to delineate...
Today, aggressive verbal behavior is generally perceived as a threat to integrity and democratic quality of public discussions, including those online. However, we argue that, in more restrictive political regimes, communicative aggression may play constructive roles in both discussion dynamics and empowerment of political groups. This might be esp...
Topic modeling as an instrument of probabilistic clustering for text collections has gained particular attention within the computational social science in Russia. This chapter looks at how topic modeling techniques have been developed and employed by the Russian scholars, both for Russian and other languages. We divide the works on topic modeling...
Recently, communication scholars have paid attention to the growing dissonant and dissipative character of the public spheres, especially in their connection to networked discursive spaces. While substantial dissonance of the discussions is well addressed, structural discontinuity of public discussion remains under-explored. Reproducibility of the...
In April to June 2020, Russia passed through a major COVID-19 lockdown which, as elsewhere, has led to a rise of online connectivity and co-practice. We argue that several online mass-participation activities by Russians during the lockdown have grown into examples of contributive action. As a type of connective action, contributive action is based...
The paper is dedicated to solving the problem of optimal text classification in the areaof automated detection of typology of texts. In conventional approaches to topicality-based textclassification (including topic modeling), the number of clusters is to be set up by the scholar, andthe optimal number of clusters, as well as the quality of the mod...
Today’s communicative environment, including the rise of social media, makes journalists perform publicly as both professionals and private citizens. In these circumstances, practices of self-limitation and self-censorship may extend to online behaviour. In this article, we analyse what makes journalists in public affairs media limit themselves in...
Background. Topic modelling is a method of automated probabilistic detection of topics in a text collection. Use of topic modelling for short texts, e.g. tweets or search engine queries, is complicated due to their short length and grammatical flaws, including broken word order, abbreviations, and contamination of different languages. At the same t...
Background. The spread of affective content on social media, as well as user grouping based on affect [1], has been a focus of scholarly attention for over a decade. But, despite this, we lack evidence on what roles various particular emotions play in the dynamics of discussions on social media. Emotional contagion theory (Hatfield et al. 2014) ada...
Professional journalistic cultures have been an important area in journalism studies, but the major comparative studies of journalistic cultures have focused on the national level of analysis, without addressing the heterogeneity of journalists’ value orientations and treatment of professional standards and risks. Fragmentation of today’s Russian m...
Till today, classification of documents into negative, neutral, or positive remains a key task within the analysis of text tonality/sentiment. There are several methods for the automatic analysis of text sentiment. The method based on network models, the most linguistically sound, to our viewpoint, allows us take into account the syntagmatic connec...
For the purposes of searching for various communities on the Internet, automatic typology of text messages defined via application of methods of cluster analysis may be used. In this paper, we address one of the significant issues in text classification via cluster analysis, namely determination of the number of clusters. For clustering based on se...
Studies of political polarization in social media demonstrate mixed evidence for whether discussions necessarily evolve into left and right ideological echo chambers. Recent research shows that, for political and issue-based discussions, patterns of user clusterization may differ significantly, but that cross-cultural evidence of the polarization o...
Russian media have recently (re-)gained attention of the scholarly community, mostly due to the rise of cyber-attacking techniques and computational propaganda efforts. A revived conceptualization of the Russian media as a uniform system driven by a well-coordinated propagandistic state effort, though having evidence thereunder, does not allow seei...
The paper presents the results of an ongoing research of Twitter discussions on inter-ethnic conflicts. The case of Biryulevo bashings is already thoroughly analyzed by the research group; in this paper, we develop a qualitative method for finding patterns of emotional (irrational) argumentation, the patterns that would link emotion and argumentati...
The linkages between intensity and topicality of online discussions, on one hand, and those of offline on-street political activity, on the other hand, have recently become a subject of studies around the world. But the results of quantitative assessment of causal relations between onsite and online activities of citizens are contradictory. In our...
This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of 4 workshops, held at the 5th International Conference on Internet Science, St. Petersburg, Russia, in October 2018: Workshop 1 : Detecting Social Problems in Online Content, Workshop 2: CONVERSATIONS, Workshop 3: The Future of Decentralized Governance: A Workshop on Encryption,
Block...
Светлана Сергеевна Бодрунова – д.полит.н., профессор, Высшая школа журналистики и массовых коммуникаций, Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет, Санкт-Петербург, Россия. Электронная почта: s.bodrunova@spbu.ru Анна Сергеевна Смолярова – к.полит..н. доцент, Высшая школа журналистики и массовых коммуникаций, Санкт-Петербургский государственны...
В статье представлен обзор современных исследований в области тонального анализа естественного языка (sentiment analysis, сентимент-анализ) в сети Интернет, в том числе на платформе микроблогов Twitter (Твиттер). Описаны направления современных исследований тональности твитов, методологические, технические и иные проблемы при анализе наборов данных...
Over the past few years the sentiment analysis task of users' posts in social networks has become very popular among researchers. In this paper, authors present and describe the developed multi-lingual knowledge-based approach of sentiment analysis in major conflict ad hoc discussions of the social network Twitter. An experiment is made in which th...
Background. Public discussions on social networks have trans-border and multilingual nature. This is especially true for conflictual discussions that reach global trending topics. Being part of the global public sphere, such discussions were expected by many observers to become horizontal, all-involving, and democratically efficient. But, with time...
Background. The growing complexity of website navigation demands more behavior-oriented research. Today, static and sequential menus have become virtually incompatible with adaptive forms of web layouts; tagging-based menus started to dominate; and these navigational elements more and more co-exist on webpages. Previous research compares the three...
Ad hoc discussions have been gaining a growing amount of attention in scholarly discourse. But earlier research has raised doubts in comparability of ad hoc discussions in social media, as they are formed by unstable, affective, and hardly predictable issue publics. We have chosen inter-ethnic conflicts in the USA, Germany, France, and Russia (six...
The crisis in Ukraine was one of the dominant topics in international news coverage of 2014 and the following years. Representing a conflict along the lines of an East-Western confrontation unprecedented since the end of the Cold War, the news reporting in different European countries with different historical backgrounds is an essential research t...
Within the last decade, hashtag-based publics and various aspects of the discussions produced by them have created a rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary research linking public opinion and public sphere studies to social network analysis. Despite this growth, there is still scarce evidence that ‘Habermas is on Twitter’, due to the affective...
The media are normatively expected to play significant roles in conflictual discussions within national and international communities. As previous research shows, digital platforms make scholars rethink these roles based on media behavior in online communicative environments as well as on the structural limitations of the platforms. At the same tim...
Recently, the growing role of social network users in content dissemination has brought to life the concept of secondary gatekeeping – selection and republication of content already selected and published by traditional gatekeepers. Secondary gatekeeping is believed to be raising the media in-platform visibility, but it may also have negative effec...
Embeddedness of politicians and political organizations in a discussion defines its level of institutionalization and creates a public arena for collaboration between publics and institutional actors. Thus, testing whether traditional hierarchies (in terms of presence of politically institutionalized actors) show up in online discussions deserves s...
Online communication platforms have rapidly become a substantial element of e-governance processes in Europe and beyond. Today, research has shown that, in cases of social unrest and/or emergency, political actors responsible for their resolution are able to efficiently use microblogging platforms (including Twitter) to promote the discourse of har...
Today, a range of research approaches is used to define the so-called influencers in discussions in social media, and one can trace both conceptual and methodological differences in how influencers are defined and tracked. We distinguish between ‘marketing’ and ‘deliberative’ conceptualization of influencers and between metrics based on absolute fi...
Background. Understanding the relations between user perception and aesthetics is crucial for web design. But it is frequent in today’s graphic and media design that rules, established by practitioners even before the advent of Internet and still untested empirically, are taught at design schools and widely used for online interface design. So far,...
With growth of Internet communication, hopes rose that online discussions will equalize ordinary users and institutional discussants. But what roles traditional media play in online discussions remains under-researched. We argue that mediatization of Twitter discourse is worth studying, as activity of registered media in online discussions may play...
With the emergence of discussion platforms like Twitter, the hopes rose that computer-mediated public sphere would become more even in access to discussion than mass-mediatized public sphere of the late 20th century. Scholars have argued that it will eventually form an 'opinion crossroads' where conflicts would be discussed by all the parties invol...
Understanding the mechanisms of visual perception is important in the context of both media research and its applications in design practice. Within the functional approach to interface design, eye tracking is an established method to analyze interface efficacy. At the same time, in today's media design, many rules have been established by practiti...
Topic modeling has emerged over the last decade as a powerful tool for analyzing large text corpora, including Web-based user-generated texts. Topic stability, however, remains a concern: topic models have a very complex optimization landscape with many local maxima, and even different runs of the same model yield very different topics. Aiming to a...
Topic modeling is a powerful tool for analyzing large collections of user-generated web content, but it still suffers from problems with topic stability, which are especially important for social sciences. We evaluate stability for different topic models and propose a new model, granulated LDA, that samples short sequences of neighboring words at o...
Current social structures can be described more effectively with reference to value orientations, consumer patterns and Internet use rather than classic demographics. This approach to social stratification results into the idea of social milieus more flexible than the picture provided by rigid class categorisations. Social milieus differ in many re...
According to a number of scholars, Twitter possesses big potential to become a ‘crossroads of discourses’ due to its openness, de-hierarchization, and spontaneity (Miller 2014, Shirky 2008). At the same time, substantial criticism has risen towards political and deliberative efficacy of Twitter (Fuchs 2013). The authors aim at analyzing the feature...
An important text mining problem is to find, in a large collection of texts, documents related to specific topics and then discern further structure among the found texts. This problem is especially important for social sciences, where the purpose is to find the most representative documents for subsequent qualitative interpretation. To solve this...
This article is in Russian.
Исследование особенностей альтернативного конвергентного медиа (журнал и телепроект Vice) и его сравнение с журналом и телепроектом The New Yorker.
С развитием технологий многие альтернативные издания, раньше выходившие ограниченным тиражом и доступные лишь небольшому количеству людей, превратились в полноценные онлайн-...
При Институте истории культур в Москве открылся Центр медиаисследований, созданный с целью активизировать научный обмен между российскими и европейскими специалистами в области медиаобразования. Среди тем первой сессии, которая прошла 22–23 сентября 2010 г., были подготовка специалистов по массмедиа в вузах в соответствии с требованиями отрасли, пе...
Some five to seven years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, a whole culture of helping "Chernobyl children" grew in the regions most affected by the radioactive fallout, fuelled by the presence of several international charity bodies such as the Red Cross and national charities of some Western countries. For the generation of Belarusian children wh...
Projects
Projects (2)
The conference unites researchers interested in the multi-disciplinary field of comparative studies of media and communication. Since 2013, the conference has acquired a strong reputation for linking scholars around the world and adding comparative perspectives to the burning research issues.
The project is dedicated to the comparative analysis of the relationship of value and social stratification, online discussions and political behavior of citizens of Russia and other countries during and immediately after the ethno-political conflict. The main objective of the project is to identify how values’ stratification of modern societies is reflected in online discussions, and how this, in turn, is connected with the peculiarities of political mobilization during the social conflict (for example, ethnic and political conflict). Based on the analysis, recommendations on monitoring of social networks (including software and hardware, and instructions on its use) may be produced, and conflicts with ethno-social nature in Russia and in foreign countries may be prevented.
