Publications

This book explores the reasons behind the unexpected rise to power of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian with no political background, and offers an in-depth analysis of the populist messages he delivered to the Ukrainian people via his TV show.

Taking a discourse analysis approach, the author draws on two main arguments of critical scholarship: the “populist explosion” of the recent decade came as a reaction to the inequalities and injustices of the global neoliberal order, and the success of neoliberalism can be explained by its ability to mask itself under attractive progressive covers. Developing these lines of argument, the book demonstrates not only how the “populist explosion” can lead to  further neoliberalization, but also that the euphemizing effect can be achieved by mixing the virtual and the real, as in the case of Zelensky.

Departmental academic support plays an important role in a doctoral journey. However, different types of support may be related to different outcomes. This paper aims to provide a categorisation of types of departmental academic support and analyse the relationship between these different categories of support and doctoral students' confidence that they will complete their dissertations. The empirical base for the research is data from a cross-institutional survey of doctoral students at six Russian universities. Based on the results of latent class analysis (LCA), we distinguished six types of departmental academic support depending on the functions performed by supervisors, other faculty members and department heads. Consistent with previous research, we found that departmental academic support plays a crucial role in doctoral students' experiences and outcomes, while lack of support is related to a lower level of confidence about completing a dissertation. At the same time, our results provide evidence that excessive collective engagement in doctoral students' work from departmental staff may be less effective than the strong engagement of a supervisor, assisted by informational support from other staff members.

This volume constitutes refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Digital Transformation and Global Society, DTGS 2021, held as a virtual event in June 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. 

The 34 revised full papers and 4 short papers presented in the volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 95 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ​eSociety: social informatics and digital inclusion issues; ePolity: e-governance and regulation; eCity: smart cities and urban planning; eHumanities: digital education and research methods; eCommunication: online discources and attitudes; eEconomy: challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic; eEconomy: e-commerce research.

This paper studies the willingness among Russia’s population to try out three new transport technologies: electric cars, car-sharing, and autonomous driving. The assumption is that these three offerings will in the near future appear as autonomously driving vehicles booked on a subscription basis. Next to socio-economic parameters such as age, gender, place of living or holding a driver’s licence, we introduce three measures: values of self-expression, attitudes towards science and technology and attitudes towards novelties in general to explain the likelihood to try out these transport innovations. Thereby, this paper increases the understanding of the preconditions that lead to widespread acceptance of transport innovations. An analysis of the psychological set-up of the respondents allowed for the identification of a group of enthusiasts that are excited to try out these new transportation offerings. We argue that application of such an approach deepens the understanding of social mechanisms behind technology adoption and can be useful for the identification of social groups that support related processes.

Political Internet memes are an underresearched phenomenon situated at the intersection of digital and political communication. Regarded as a unit of cultural information transmitted online, such a meme can be considered as both a manifestation of anonymous networked creativity and a mechanism of political participation. The article presents the results of an investigation into Internet memes generated by protest discourses on Runet (Russian Internet). The examination of Internet content allows us to draw conclusions as to the thematic emphases of protest actions represented in Runet’s memosphere and the specifics of the image of Russian protest as reflected in memes.

Despite recent achievements in predicting personality traits and some other human psychological features with digital traces, prediction of subjective well-being (SWB) appears to be a relatively new task with few solutions. COVID-19 pandemic has added both a stronger need for rapid SWB screening and new opportunities for it, with online mental health applications gaining popularity and accumulating large and diverse user data. Nevertheless, the few existing works so far have aimed at predicting SWB, and have done so only in terms of Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale. None of them analyzes the scale developed by the World Health Organization, known as WHO-5 – a widely accepted tool for screening mental well-being and, specifically, for depression risk detection. Moreover, existing research is limited to English-speaking populations, and tend to use text, network and app usage types of data separately. In the current work, we cover these gaps by predicting both mentioned SWB scales on a sample of Russian mental health app users who represent a population with high risk of mental health problems. In doing so, we employ a unique combination of phone application usage data with private messaging and networking digital traces from VKontakte, the most popular social media platform in Russia. As a result, we predict Diener’s SWB scale with the state-of-the-art quality, introduce the first predictive models for WHO-5, with similar quality, and reach high accuracy in the prediction of clinically meaningful classes of the latter scale. Moreover, our feature analysis sheds light on the interrelated nature of the two studied scales: they are both characterized by negative sentiment expressed in text messages and by phone application usage in the morning hours, confirming some previous findings on subjective well-being manifestations. At the same time, SWB measured by Diener’s scale is reflected mostly in lexical features referring to social and affective interactions, while mental well-being is characterized by objective features that reflect physiological functioning, circadian rhythms and somatic conditions, thus saliently demonstrating the underlying theoretical differences between the two scales.

The purpose of the article is to consider  the possibilities that the genre of alternative history applied to the history of space, scientific and technical achievements of the 20th century opens up to public history and popular science’ professionals. The genre of alternative history, firstly, allows us to draw public attention to the fact that global scientific discoveries and technological inventions are no less important facts of modern history than wars and political confrontations. Secondly, due to deliberately antonymous to “history textbook”’s stories (for example, “Alexey Leonov landed on the Moon first”), an alternative history provokes viewers to consider in detail what seemed obvious. And finally, with the help of transmedia storytelling and modern digital tools, this awakened interest extends to the topics of natural and engineering sciences (for example, by studying a 3D virtual model of the lunar station available in the smartphone app). In addition, transmedia storytelling involves expanding the experience of the audience. Now they can not only watch the series, but also be involved in gaming and crowdsourcing practices in the project’s applications. In general, this approach allows to draw attention to the multivariance of the past, to the uncertainty of events and ideological schemes of the history of the Cold War and the first space race.

The article reveals aspects of the consumption of information content in the Russian Internet, based on academic and industrial approaches to the definition of "media consumption", content distribution platforms, the nature of the user's attitude to information, as well as on the results of an online survey and author's self-reflection.

The use of arts-based research has recently gained attention among scholars in diverse fields of social sciences for its capacity to communicate research beyond the authority of the written text as well as to engage with non-academic audiences. This article focuses on the dynamics of art as knowledge work from the perspective of contemporary art and its institutions: if academic research  goes’ to the arts then how does this ‘going’ interact with the already established politics, economies and ethics of the art field? I will be arguing that research emerges as a generalized category, if not a systemic imperative, of doing contemporary visual art, and that within this territory arts-based research encounters similar issues with those surrounding academic production and consumption. I summarize challenges pertaining to issues around deprofessionalization, new forms of distinction and art’s increasing resemblance to the information apparatus.

The book On the Digital Semiosphere by John Hartley, Indrek Ibrus, and Maarja Ojamaa is a highly original work that aims to develop a multi-dimensional method of analyzing culture and understanding the relationships among humanity, other living beings, and the planet. The authors offer a holistic method of analyzing complex interconnections between personal sense-making and global ‘big data’, whose trajectories of development appear to be mutually reinforcing. Such a ‘systematic approach to the creation of meaning and thence knowledge, by the whole species across the whole planet, is the analytical minimum needed to understand “what’s occurring”’, the authors claim

Recently the World faced force push to distant learning caused by COVID-19 disease. Statistical numbers show a notable increasing number of users of corporate educational solutions utilizing cloud architecture. However, non-cloud-based learning tools do not meet this growth. In this work the authors consider the causes of that contradictory behaviour and present an explanation based on differences between two types of these educational systems. Also, the authors formulate an interpretation giving a list of extracted technologies or product features that allow corporate solutions to quickly gain popularity among educational society. In addition, clear examples of their connection to learning methods that can improve teaching, learning, and the last, but not the least a user’s experience are provided. And finally, the authors highlight a sig- nificant role of integration and interoperability standards supporting easy com- ponents replacement and scaling.