Seminar "Social Media Through the Lens of Network Analysis: From Data to Insights"

Every interaction on social media—a repost, a follow, a mention—leaves a trace that, taken together, forms a complex map of connections. Understanding this map opens up insights that remain invisible to traditional approaches: how information bubbles form, who truly controls the dissemination of ideas, where the boundaries between communities lie, and how they change over time.

This seminar offers a perspective on social media as a networked environment—and what this means for researchers. We will discuss the nature of the data produced by this environment and demonstrate the analytical possibilities offered by working with the structure of connections: identifying key actors and points of influence, discovering latent communities and polarized clusters, reconstructing information dissemination trajectories, and locating narrative sources. Using specific case studies, we will examine how these approaches work in practice—and where they run into the limitations of the method and data.

The seminar will be of interest to anyone studying communication, public opinion, information processes, or human behavior in the digital environment—regardless of discipline and the tools used.

The seminar will be held in Russian.

Registration is required to participate.