Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008
From: Scott Gehlbach <gehlbach@polisci.wisc.edu>
Subject: NewsLab Russia: An Important New Resource for Students and Scholars of Postcommunist Russia
The Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at UW Madison has launched an exciting new resource for students and scholars of postcommunist Russia: NewsLab Russia, an online digital archive of Russian television news. Part of NewsLab Eurasia, a broader effort to archive the news in post-Soviet states, NewsLab Russia utilizes new technology to make Russian news broadcasts available for analysis and classroom use. In its first year of operation, NewsLab Russia archived the main evening news broadcast on Russia’s three national television networks (NTV, Channel One, and Rossiya) during a period that encompassed the 2007 Duma elections, the nomination of Dmitri Medvedev to succeed Vladimir Putin as president, and the 2008 Russian presidential election. Support for this initial round of archiving was provided by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UT Austin.
NewsLab Russia draws on the resources of the University of Wisconsin NewsLab, a project initiated by Wisconsin political scientist Ken Goldstein to study local U.S. news. Content from Russia is “captured” from satellite feed and stored on servers in Madison, where Russian-speaking undergraduates “clip” the news, dividing broadcasts into segments and attaching category labels to each segment. Through an online searchable archive, anyone with an Internet connection who is willing to abide by basic terms of use has access to broadcasts from all three stations. Thus, for example, a teacher of Russian might search for a news segment on Russian-Ukrainian relations for instructional use, or a scholar might analyze all reports on Ukraine over a one-year period.
Further information about NewsLab Russia, including registration instructions and a link to the archive itself, are available at www.creeca.wisc.edu/newslabeurasia.
Ted Gerber, Director, CREECA, and Professor of Sociology, UW Madison
Jennifer Tishler, Associate Director, CREECA
Scott Gehlbach, Associate Professor of Political Science, UW Madison.