Online communities

The problem of Dmitry Semenko’s dissertation research lies in the multi-level structure of scientific communication and the presence of a kind of gray areas that do not always come to the attention of researchers. For the sociology of science, studies of scientific publications, citation and co-authorship networks are paramount, but in addition to them, there are also informal associations, such as communities of scientists on social networks. These communities often provide forums for discussion, knowledge sharing, and networking that can form the basis for scientific collaboration. Therefore, network analysis of online communities has much to offer sociologists of science.

GitHub, considered from the point of view of the sociology of science, is in an intermediate position - this platform, on the one hand, serves as a social network for researchers, and, on the other hand, is a place for the production of scientific knowledge (as well as tools for research) and for collaboration in such production. In this sense, you can think of GitHub as a laboratory for scientific knowledge.

The purpose of the study is to examine GitHub as a platform for scientific collaboration using the example of digital humanities and computational social sciences.