The Study of Semantic Networks on the Example of Narrative Interviews of Soviet and Russian Sociologists

The master thesis is devoted to the study of semantic networks on the example of narrative interviews of Soviet and Russian Sociologists. It presents a description of automated data extraction for studying networks of interaction between key figures of Soviet and Russian sociological science. The empirical base of the research is biographical interviews collected as part of the historical and sociological project of B.Z. Doktorov. In the previous steps of project implementation, data was encoded using manual coding but unsatisfactory results raised the question of necessity of the automation of the data extraction to simplify and speed up the procedure for working with textual information. As a response to the need for an automated approach, we develop the specially designed software aimed to the data extraction from the narrative texts and the establishing of relationships between the extracted entities, using the algorithms developed in semantic network analysis.