«I find it very risky for people to stay in Russia both publishing or because bombed by such kind of news material». Viacheslav Romanov and Maya Guseva connected on zoom to explain their project, albeit still at an early stage, setting boundaries in which they intend to collect data and narrowing down the narratives to analyze and the number of hypotheses to test. None of the team members is in Russia, as Romanov explains. «All my journalist friends had to leave the country to move to Georgia or neighboring states. I am not expecting to return to Russia, at least in the next few years. I think it is an opportunity for me to do what I like to do».
The harsh reality of information in Russia sees the pressure, distortion and obfuscation of news. The information warfare carried out by the Kremlin through propaganda has helped spark the war of missiles and killings. Just as the vaccine protects our lungs from covid infection, developing critical thinking unable us to resist information manipulation.
The main topic of interest of the project published by Media Futures as part of the Science Technology and Arts ecosystem (short for STARTS) is the analysis of the narratives and constructs held by the Russian state-controlled media to communicate this issue and show how powerful Russian propaganda is and what means and tools it uses and how it distorts the field of information. «All of that is especially true when it comes to information published in the Russian language, but we are keen to analyze this amount of data and communicate it to a wider English-speaking audience».
Initially, the project was invented and developed before February the 24th. At its initial stage, it was mainly based on the analysis of such «devastating» concepts as war rhetoric and the use of propaganda cliches in Russian publications. «It was for us something unexpected that the topic we are addressing became much more up to date and relevant. Therefore we decided to shift the time frame of our research to “before” and “during” the war to see how these news outlets reacted to it and how they are used to bomb the population with these narratives».
Planning to combine the use of quantitative and qualitative methods, the team will be bringing out its classifiers for narratives and the units of the analysis, for instance, the categories such as the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine narrative consisting of specific linked events or the so-called protection of the Russian speaking population as the reason for starting this special operation or the alleged connection between US and Ukraine. In addition, they plan to combine neuro-language processing techniques to analyze the headers and to bring the context out of it, «because it is not only about finding the words that sometimes can be tricky».
The main format will be the website with interactive visualization of the data and the insights. It will serve as a source for the projection of interactive installation that will be made, considered to be interactive in terms of the timeline. It should be possible for the audience to move through the time and see which events are appearing and which news outlets are surrounding these events and how do they describe those. «For me, the most relevant form would be the interactive installation because it is not only the result we can get but we can show the audience also about the process. It is like working with materials building the scenery».
Several patterns will be leading the research. Initially, the work was meant to be based on the huge dataset of changes in news bodies and news headers so to verify if there is any connection between real-life events and the ways in which news is putting those changes in news headers when it comes to significant changes. «But then we decided that it might be just one of the directions that we could check so that we could work following different paths».
For example, one interesting track is the direct bombardment of news publications and articles from state-controlled media. Careful analysis reveals that these arrive very close to the date of the event because they are used to relying on fake news, so they do not conduct fact-checking. Monitoring the amount of news that arrives right at the point of the event and afterwards it would be possible to detect that independent media – «not so many in Russia» – arrive later because they need to prove facts. Another of the models that will lead the research will be checking how patterns and news headlines are changing: is there any meaningful connection between the real state of affairs and how the media react to it and therefore how it is perceived?
As of last, it will be tested if there is any kind of censorship after the new legislation in Russia, that commonly works against people talking about the war, making the profession of the journalist very risky with numerous criminal cases and punishments as consequences. «That of censorship has been a very gradual growth in the Russian media, but in the last couple of months it has peaked».
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