Book chapter
Educational Migration from Russia to the Nordic Countries, China and the Middle East. Social Media Data
We use social media and WWW data to analyse international educational migration from Russia. We find substantial regional differences in migration patterns for three contrast directions: the Nordic countries, China and the Middle East. We built a model of migration flows with geographic distances to destination countries, various socio-demographic data and institutional characteristics of educational organisations.
In book

The northern island of Japanese Archipelago - Hokkaido - has 34 cities on it and the most of them experiences depopulation and economic stagnation. The paper gives a brief survey of activies in social media the municipal authorities and local citizens'communities take to rebrand and promote their cities.
The rapid penetration of web-based technologies into our social life creates challenges both for teachers and students to face. The purpose of the paper to dwell upon the implementation of social media as web-based technologies into the educational environment in the university. Social media application is considered at macro and micro levels within the university structure. Particular attention is paid to the description of LMS system at a macro level and LMS products to support a particular discipline at a micro level The authors propose the idea that particular pedagogical conditions must be created for successful deployment of the technologies. The participative approach is suggested as a basis of teacher-student collaboration.
The availability of large urban social media data creates new opportunities for studying cities. In our paper we propose a new direction for this research: a joint analysis of geolocations of shared images and their content as determined by computer vision. To test our ideas, we use a dataset of 47,410 Instagram images shared in the city of St.Petersburg over one year. We show how a combination of semantic clustering, image recognition and geospatial analysis can detect important patterns related to both how people use a city and how they represent in social media.
This paper studies different aspects of a linguo-political conflict concerned with choosing between two Russian toponymic variants – Belorussia and Belarus’ as well as adjectives belorusskij (Belorussian) and belarus(s)kij (Belarusian) and ethnonyms belorus and belarus. The core of the problem is that in the Russian language of Russia the variant Belorussia is used, which is considered to be insulting by many Belarusians, who prefer to use the variant Belarus while speaking Russian. In an attempt to understand the structure of this conflict, we analyze how and why the toponym Belarus appeared and spread through the newspapers of 1990-s, study the data from two online polls and the distribution of some words derived from the two toponymic variants, and finally discuss the scenarios of conflict communication in discussions in various social media. One of the polls shows the social distribution of the two toponymic variants and the other examines the attitude of the Belarusians towards the toponym Belorussia and its derivates. We show that each side of the conflict has its own limited set of ideas that reappear in conflict communication in comments under different articles on the Internet.
Internet Studies is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field of fundamental and applied research that integrate different research disciplines with a common object, that is the Internet. This review article gives a definition and a brief description of the structure of Internet Studies as part of the social sciences and introduces research agenda of this field, including most cutting edge research issues. The agenda of Internet Studies related to classical sociological issues are analyzed in more detail: inequality, online communities and social capital as well as topics related to the study of transformations in different spheres of society - politics, public health and medicine, education. Two main theoretical approaches are briefly described, within which the influence of the Internet on society is interpreted: the network society theory and critical theory of the Internet and society. We conclude that the present directions of Internet research have many intersections with each other, and the perspective of a more complete study of the mechanisms, that mediate social changes related to the Internet and connect online and offline sociality into a single space, opens at these intersections.
The social and community driven aspects of our digital lives continue to rapidly increase, resulting in transformative behaviors and, significantly, publishing and distributing huge amounts of fascinating data. The seventh meeting of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-13) held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, promised to be a benchmark year for ICWSM. Thanks to the enthusiastic participation of our community, we received a record number of submissions, with a growth of 50 percent over the previous year. More than the quantity, however, the high quality of the submitted papers is the truest evidence that ICWSM is maturing in its role as a premier venue for social media research.
Not dissimilar to many other countries, migration in Russia has a pronounced age-dependent pattern with the peak intensity at the age when people obtain a professional education. In this paper, we analyze migration intensity at student age (17–21) using three sources of demographic data with due regard for their key opportunities and limitations. We compare the migration attractiveness of Russian regions in three ways: (1) applying APC analysis to registration data, separately for two periods: 2003–2010 and 2011–2013; the reason for sampling these two periods is because there was a significant change in the migration statistics collection practices in 2011; (2) using the age-shift method to analyze the data of the 2002 and 2010 Russian Censuses; we offer a way to refine the census data by discarding the non-migration-related changes in the age-sex structure; (3) using information about the average ratio of full-time university enrolments to the number of high school graduates in the academic years 2012/13 and 2013/14 across the regions. Based on the four indicators of migration intensity (intercensal estimates, statistical records for the two periods, and the graduate-enrolment ratio), we develop a ranking of the regions of Russia in migration attractiveness for young adults. A position in this ranking depends not only on the level of higher education development in a region but also on the consistent patterns of interregional migration in Russia. The regions in the European part of the country have a much higher chance of attracting student migrants.
This book is the essential guide for understanding how state power and politics are contested and exercised on social media. It brings together contributions by social media scholars who explore the connection of social media with revolutions, uprising, protests, power and counter-power, hacktivism, the state, policing and surveillance. It shows how collective action and state power are related and conflict as two dialectical sides of social media power, and how power and counter-power are distributed in this dialectic. Theoretically focused and empirically rigorous research considers the two-sided contradictory nature of power in relation to social media and politics. Chapters cover social media in the context of phenomena such as contemporary revolutions in Egypt and other countries, populism 2.0, anti-austerity protests, the fascist movement in Greece's crisis, Anonymous and police surveillance.
In this book, the impact of modern social media on the development of management system in the hospitality and tourism industry is examined. The present research project was elaborated in two subsequent phases. During the first research phase the localization of the apparatus, methodology, study design, questionnaire and methodology for the Russian version of the research project were carried out. That was done based on the courtesy materials recently completed project by a Center for Hospitality Research Cornel the United States. The second project phase was aimed at identification of the specifics of the Russian consumers perception towards the use of social media for planning their trips.