Using Social Network Analysis to explore East European politics on YouTube

This methods lecture will give participants the skills needed to analyze relational YouTube data in the context of Eastern European politics.  The first part of the lecture will introduce core concepts and methods in Social Network Analysis. The lecture’s second part will give participants a hands-on guide to downloading data and analyzing information networks on YouTube.  As an empirical example, the participants will analyze networks related to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

For those who want to stay for the practical session, they will have to install Gephi on their computer. This software is free: https://gephi.org/.

Yevgeniy Golovchenko, a PhD fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, uses computational social science to explore disinformation, censorship and political participation on social media. He is a member of the Digital Disinformation research group and the Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS).