The Russia Data Lab is an academic project to shed light on the political situation in Russia using publicly availible data

A data source highly availible to social science reserachers is social media data. Russians talk politics every day between each other, hence sharing their thoughts about daily events, the political regime—yielding insights into the actual political life of the country.

The project is led by Mikhail Zherebtsov and Serge Goussev:
Mikhail
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Mikhail is a Post Doctoral researcher in Russian Social Media, E-government, Government 2.0.

Serge
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Serge is an independent computational social science researcher.