Building and sharing a knowledge base on Russian international acting and thinking

Great powers still matter disproportionately. This truism implies that the world would greatly benefit from getting a better analytical handle on what really makes these ever surprising geopolitical entities - first and foremost China, but to us Europeans still also Russia (and increasingly even the United States) - tick. Today, that analysis still remains very much in the hands of what I like to call 'prima donnas' (and I am of course as 'guilty', as many of the colleagues I'm 'charging' here). Many of us have been studying these countries intensively for decades. Many of us have come to different conclusions about what these actors have been doing, about what is really makes them 'tick'. Many of us write articles, reports and books; we advise decision-makers; we present and discuss our views at conferences; we are active on social media; we interact with more traditional media. Very few of us, however, have been trying to build a dispassionate, comprehensive, rigorous and creative knowledge base. Georgia Tech and HCSS have been engaged in such an effort for the past two years, and we would like to invite interested colleagues to reach out to us to join us in this effort.

For the past two years, we have been working hard with a great interdisciplinary international team from HCSS (in Holland and in Ukraine) and from Georgia Tech (in the US) to start bringing 'data intensive' science to the hard-nosed analysis of Russian multi-domain international acting and thinking. We gave this multi-year research effort, which is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the US Defense Department's Minerva Research Initiative, the name 'RuBase'.  The ‘base’ in RuBase refers both to the knowledge base the team is building and to its (aspirationally) foundational nature. Existing and new text- and numbers-based datasets and -tools are being collated and explored through both human analysis and (supervised and unsupervised) machine-learning algorithms. This should generate a new visual and interactive knowledge base on Russia that will be positioned as a platform for new collaborative ways of cumulative knowledge building on this topic that is only gaining in policy relevance. For those interested, here is a general 11' video on the RuBase research program.

And here is another video of an early application of our RuBase approach to the case of Russian coercion towards Ukraine over the past decade

I will be posting more entries about this on this blog over the next few months. But I already wanted to share that we have now collated a number of 'corpora' (collections of text documents) on key policy issues..

The next step that we are embarking upon right now is to start systematically annotating these corpora. And so I am delighted to announce that HCSS today reached a partnership agreement with Berlin-based Tal Perry from lighttag to start using this very promising text annotation tool to annotate these corpora. We selected lighttag because it seemed to us to represent an unusually propitious balance between ease of use in annotating; AI-'smarts'; team workflow balancing; visual elegance; and 'openness' (you can load AND deconflict pre-annotations before you start annotating; and the results are also exportable and re-useable).  
We would like to ask any of our colleagues who are working on any of these topics and who are intrigued by the promise of new 'data-science'-tools to reach out to us. We will be happy to give you access to our knowledge base on all of this and to include you in our annotation efforts. We will also keep reporting honestly on our own experiences in this field.