The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies Edited by Daria Gritsenko Mariëlle Wijermars · Mikhail Kopotev The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies Daria Gritsenko Mariëlle Wijermars • Mikhail Kopotev Editors The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies Editors Daria Gritsenko Mariëlle Wijermars University of Helsinki Maastricht University Helsinki, Finland Maastricht, The Netherlands Mikhail Kopotev Higher School of Economics (HSE University) Saint Petersburg, Russia ISBN 978-3-030-42854-9 ISBN 978-3-030-42855-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42855-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland PREFACE This Handbook emerged out of the Digital Russia Studies (DRS) initiative,1 launched by Daria Gritsenko and Mariëlle Wijermars at the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute and Helsinki Center for Digital Humanities (HELDIG) in January 2018. The aim of the DRS initiative was to unite schol- ars of the humanities and the social and computer sciences working at the intersection of “digital” and “social” in the Russian context. By providing a regular meeting place and networking opportunities, we sought to establish open discussion and knowledge sharing among those who study the various aspects of digitalization processes in Russia and those studying Russia with the use of (innovative) digital methods. The many positive responses to our inter- disciplinary approach and the exciting research that is currently conducted in this area of study inspired us to join forces with Mikhail Kopotev to compile this Handbook. The editors would like to thank Lucy Batrouney and Mala Sanghera-Warren, our commissioning editors at Palgrave Macmillan, for their enthusiasm for the project as well as the anonymous reviewers for their critical eye. We thank the Faculty of Arts of the University of Helsinki for making it possible to publish the Handbook in Open Access. We are particularly grateful to Aleksandr Klimov, our research assistant, who was of great help in preparing the manu- script for publication. The interdisciplinarity of the Handbook has affected our choice concerning the transliteration of Russian. While it is customary for scholars working in the humanities and social sciences to apply the Library of Congress system of trans- literation, for scholars in linguistics and computer science a different system, ISO 9, is more appropriate. For consistency, we have chosen to follow the v vi PREFACE Library of Congress system for references (authors’ names) and ISO 9 for all other Russian terms and names throughout the book. Where appropriate, cus- tomary English spellings are maintained for familiar terms, places, and per- sonal names. Helsinki, Finland Daria Gritsenko Maastricht, The Netherlands Mariëlle Wijermars Saint Petersburg, Russia Mikhail Kopotev NOTE 1. https://blogs.helsinki.f/digital-russia-studies/. COnTEnTS 1 Digital Russia Studies: An Introduction 1 Daria Gritsenko, Mikhail Kopotev, and Mariëlle Wijermars Part I Studying Digital Russia 13 2 The Digitalization of Russian Politics and Political Participation 15 Mariëlle Wijermars 3 E-Government in Russia: Plans, Reality, and Future Outlook 33 Daria Gritsenko and Mikhail Zherebtsov 4 Russia’s Digital Economy Program: An Effective Strategy for Digital Transformation? 53 Anna Lowry 5 Law and Digitization in Russia 77 Marianna Muravyeva and Alexander Gurkov 6 Personal Data Protection in Russia 95 Alexander Gurkov 7 Cybercrime and Punishment: Security, Information War, and the Future of Runet 115 Elizaveta Gaufman vii viii Contents 8 Digital Activism in Russia: The Evolution and Forms of Online Participation in an Authoritarian State 135 Markku Lonkila, Larisa Shpakovskaya, and Philip Torchinsky 9 Digital Journalism: Toward a Theory of Journalistic Practice in the Twenty-First Century 155 Vlad Strukov 10 Digitalization of Russian Education: Changing Actors and Spaces of Governance 171 Nelli Piattoeva and Galina Gurova 11 Digitalization of Religion in Russia: Adjusting Preaching to New Formats, Channels and Platforms 187 Victor Khroul 12 Doing Gender Online: Digital Spaces for Identity Politics 205 Olga Andreevskikh and Marianna Muravyeva 13 Digitalization of Consumption in Russia: Online Platforms, Regulations and Consumer Behavior 221 Olga Gurova and Daria Morozova 14 Digital Art: A Sourcebook of Ideas for Conceptualizing New Practices, Networks and Modes of Self-Expression 241 Vlad Strukov 15 From Samizdat to New Sincerity. Digital Literature on the Russian-Language Internet 255 Henrike Schmidt 16 Run Runet Runaway: The Transformation of the Russian Internet as a Cultural-Historical Object 277 Gregory Asmolov and Polina Kolozaridi Contents ix Part II Digital Sources and Methods 297 17 Corpora in Text-Based Russian Studies 299 Mikhail Kopotev, Arto Mustajoki, and Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya 18 RuThes Thesaurus for Natural Language Processing 319 Natalia Loukachevitch and Boris Dobrov 19 Social Media-based Research of Interpersonal and Group Communication in Russia 335 Olessia Koltsova, Alexander Porshnev, and Yadviga Sinyavskaya 20 Digitizing Archives in Russia: Epistemic Sovereignty and Its Challenges in the Digital Age 353 Alexey Golubev 21 Affordances of Digital Archives: The Case of the Prozhito Archive of Personal Diaries 371 Ekaterina Kalinina 22 Open Government Data in Russia 389 Olga Parkhimovich and Daria Gritsenko 23 Topic Modeling in Russia: Current Approaches and Issues in Methodology 409 Svetlana S. Bodrunova 24 Topic Modeling Russian History 427 Mila Oiva 25 Studying Ideational Change in Russian Politics with Topic Models and Word Embeddings 443 Andrey Indukaev x Contents 26 Deep Learning for the Russian Language 465 Ekaterina Artemova 27 Shifting the Norm: The Case of Academic Plagiarism Detection 483 Mikhail Kopotev, Andrey Rostovtsev, and Mikhail Sokolov 28 Automatic Sentiment Analysis of Texts: The Case of Russian 501 Natalia Loukachevitch 29 Social Network Analysis in Russian Literary Studies 517 Frank Fischer and Daniil Skorinkin 30 Tweeting Russian Politics: Studying Online Political Dynamics 537 Mikhail Zherebtsov and Sergei Goussev 31 The State of the Art: Surveying Digital Russian Art History 569 Reeta E. Kangas 32 Geospatial Data Analysis in Russia’s Geoweb 585 Mykola Makhortykh Index 605 NOTES On COnTRIBUTORS Olga Andreevskikh is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, UK. Her PhD thesis focuses on the verbal and visual communication of non-­ heteronormative masculinities in contemporary Russian media. Her other research projects focus on offine and online activism for women’s and LGBTQ rights in contemporary Russia. Ekaterina Artemova is a researcher at the National Researcher University Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Saint Petersburg, Russia. Her research interests include natural language processing in general as well as applications of deep learning to information extraction and question answering. Gregory Asmolov is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Russia Institute, King’s College London. His research focuses on how ICTs constitute the role of crowds in crisis situations. He has published in Journalism Studies, Policy & Internet, Russian Politics, MIT’s Journal of Design and Science, and others on vertical crowdsourcing, digital propaganda, and Internet regulation. Svetlana S. Bodrunova is a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, where she also leads the Center for International Media Research. She has published two books, several chapters, and over 80 research papers in Russian and English, including in Journalism, International Journal of Communication, Media and Communication,