Mapping Ideas: Semantic Analysis of "PostNauka" Materials

Sociology of Science and Technology. 2018. Vol. 9. No. 1. P. 156–164.

Gorgadze A., Kolycheva A.

"PostNauka" is a project (quite similar to the global set of conferences "TED") about modern fundamental science and the scientists who create it. The website was established in 2012 as a platform, participating in the popularization of scientific knowledge. More than 3000 materials were published on it. Surprisingly, no one has tried to carry out the analysis of these materials until now. We decided to fill this gap by conducting our own research on PostNauka. An inspiring example to be followed was the performance by Sean Gourley and Eric Berlow, who showed the map of themes similarity in the TED-speeches and the way new topics were born on the periphery of global themes. We conducted the same type of analysis for PostNauka to show the existence or the lack of links between topics, to define the extent of interdisciplinarity of the project and to check the rightness of sections proposed by the website. We took all video-materials transcripts published on www.postnauka. ru. Two types of methods were combined for analysis: semantic analysis methods and network analysis. As a result, we got the mind-maps of PostNauka materials. They demonstrate how the materials are tied, which disciplines are exceled and how they are sorting with the official classification of the website.

Keywords: interdisciplinarity, семантические сети, междисциплинарность, text mining, semantic networks, PostNauka, co-word map, ПостНаука