Initiatives conducting content analysis related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

review of literature
content analysis
A review of content-analysis-based ongoing initiatives and past studies related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, local dynamics in the Donbas or other Russia-controlled territories in Ukraine
Author

Giorgio Comai

Published

November 20, 2022

Work-in-progress

This page is still a work-in-progress. It is shared in the spirit of keeping the research process as open as possible, but it still a draft document, possibly an early draft: incomplete, unedited, and possibily inaccurate. Datasets included may likewise not be fully verified.

Context

Russian Media Observation and Research (RuMOR)

Self-described as: Tracking Russia’s domestic war narratives and disinformation. Principal Investigator Paul Goode.

Based at: Institute of European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Carlton University

Funded by: The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Texty.org.ua

Texty.org.ua is an independent media organisation based in Ukraine.

They also conduct systematic monitoring of Russian media.

See: https://texty.org.ua/tag/disinfomonitor/

Example: African Mercenaries Escape Poverty by Coming to Die for Ukraine. Russian Media Monitoring Report, 28 November-4 December 2022

Methodology:

We have built a corpus of all the materials from Russian websites and those maintained by the occupation force (almost 22,000 news items) for our weekly disinformation monitoring report. Each paragraph was processed by the algorithm which defines its topic automatically. The resulting topics (i.e. groups with similar content) were short-listed by the topics relating to the war or its consequences for Russia. The number of mentions of a certain topic was then counted for each publication. Our conclusions are based on the respective findings and the quotes from paragraphs referring to each topic. Source

Funded by: This specific activity is funded by NDI

Putin 20 years - the words, the person, the sysem

A multimedia project based on content analysis of presidential speeches and press releases.

https://putin.dekoder.org/en/

Dekoder

About: A joint project by dekoder and the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. See https://putin.dekoder.org/about/

Russia Media Monitor

[…]

Public opinion research

Of course, public opinion research is not based on content analysis, but these may offer relevant insights for further research on specific time frames or cases based on content analysis.

Russia Watcher

Self-described as: “The Russia Watcher is a daily tracking survey of Russian public opinion, run by political scientists at the Department of Politics, Princeton University”

Based at: Department of Politics, Princeton University

Official website: https://russiawatcher.com/

On the Fediverse: https://mastodon.world/@russia_watcher

On Twitter: https://twitter.com/russia_watcher

Extreme scan

https://www.extremescan.eu/about

Chronicles

https://www.chronicles.report/en

Previous projects

Tolz and Teper (2018)

“Mediating Post – Soviet Difference: An Analysis of Russian Television Representations of Inter – Ethnic Cohesion Issues,” which was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council [project code AH/HO18964/1]; and “Reframing Russia: From Cold War to Information War?,” which is funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council [project code AH/P00508X/1].

References

Tolz, Vera, and Yuri Teper. 2018. “Broadcasting Agitainment: A New Media Strategy of Putins Third Presidency.” Post-Soviet Affairs 34 (4): 213–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2018.1459023.