Organisation
Harvard University
Report
Mapping Russian twitter
Drawing from a corpus of over 50 million Russian-language tweets collected between for a year until March 2011, this US paper creates a network map of 10,285 users comprising the ‘discussion core,’ and clustered them based on a combination of network features. The resulting segmentation revealed key online constituencies active in Russian Twitter The major...
Report
Accountability and transparency at ICANN: an independent review
The performance of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) regarding transparency is not currently meeting its potential. In August 2010, selected faculty and researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet; Society Harvard University (referred to as the “Berkman team”) initiated an independent, exploratory study analysing ICANN’s decision-making processes and communications with its...
Report
Public discourse in the Russian blogosphere: mapping RuNet politics and mobilization
This paper analyses Russian blogs to discover networks of discussion around politics and public affairs. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation, the Berkman Center is undertaking a two-year research project to investigate the role of the Internet in Russian society. The study will include a number of interrelated areas of inquiry that contribute to and...
Discussion paper
Should copyright of academic works be abolished?
The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers...
Report
Mapping the Arabic blogosphere: politics, culture and dissent
This report uses a unique methodology that blends link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs to investigate the online discussions taking place across the Middle East and North Africa. Internet & Democracy project director Bruce Etling and his team, with Morningside Analytics founder and Berkman affiliate John Kelly, and co-authors Robert...