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There we publish extended blog-posts about our research
The CSRLab was established at Teplitsa. Technologies for Social Good in 2021 to research civil society online communication practices. The main focus is on the Russian-registered NGOs.
What do we do? Research non-reactive data concerning NGOs with data science methods
Aim
The CSRLab is a data-driven research project for the Russian civil society online communication practices.
Mission: evaluating of communicative capacity of the Russian-language third sector and establishing best communicative practices. The communicative capacity indicates the organization’s ability to undertake work aimed at conveying the most important information to beneficiaries, donors, and society at large (especially if the organization engages in advocacy work).
The CSRLab focuses on the online communications of the third-sector via their websites and social media. We investigate both officially established organizations (registered by Russian authorities as a non-commercial organization) and non-registered communities of activists and their organistaions. Examples of the later communities is anti-war and humanitarian movements that multiplied across Russia and abroad after Russia invaded Ukraine in Februrary 2022.
Our data
Over 9k NGOs in our dataset!
Read about the structure of our dataset and our database: dataset with websites and MongoDB database structure.
Non-reactive data is collected by means of web scrapping and through APIs. The use of non-reactive data is a principle demand for us, an effort to overcome the limitations of previous studies that used biased samples or self-survey data. By collecting and analyzing data in house, we try to avoid subjective assessments made by NGO representatives.
By August 2022 our sample contains 13k+ :fire: organizations and communities (both legally registered in Russia and not-registered legally anywhere).
Methods used
- data scraping, processing and cleansing
- descriptive statistics
- inferential statistics
- social network analysis
- data visualization
Technologies
- python
- pandas, jupyter
- plotly, seaborn, gephi
- MongoDB
- OpenRefine
On-going research:
- Best communication practices for non-profit organisations in social media: engagement rates, usage of different social media platforms, influence of Russian laws on limiting communication through social media. Comparison of Vkontakte and Telegram platforms
- Web scrapping non-profit organisations by snowballing method (finding out who refers to whom in social media and establishing a graph of connections between organisations)
- Topic modelling for non-profit organisations social media platforms
Further research directions:
- Non-registered non-profit organisations communication practices
- Hate speech detection both in comments and in posts and defining the cause for hate speech
Check out some of our analytics:
Civil Society Research Lab is the project of “Teplitsa. Technologies for Social Good” established in 2021.
