Tom Snijders in the Higher School of Economics

Tom Snijders, a well-known sociologist and statistician, Professor at the University of Oxford (UK), Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield Collegeand Professor at the University of Groningen, visited the St. Petersburg campus of the HSE and met with students and staff. By the SESL invitation, he visited the HSE building at Sedov Str. on Thursday, March 12, 2015.

On the first day of his visit, he attended an open research seminar for the HSE staff and students.

The seminar was opened by a presentation of our colleagues from Moscow, Dilara Valeyeva and Sophia Dokuka, who spoke about their new project, "Friendly Relationships and Relationships of Assistance at a University." Their research is focused on studying the relationship between the individual characteristics of students and their companions on the one hand, and the friendly relations and assistance during their studying on the other.  During the discussion that took place after this presentation, Professor Snijders shared his ideas about the possible ways of further research for this project. 

In the second part of the seminar, second year students of the Department of Sociology presented their research projects. Denis Bulygin presented his project "To beat, or not to beat”, with a study of relationships between the Russian rap artists that arise from their joint recordings of audio tracks. In this study, he also examined the mechanisms of promotions employed by the young artists. 

The project by Daria Kharkina was also related to music and dealt with a difference in musical tastes between different groups of students. In addition, she has identified the sets of artists whose tracks more often go together. After that, Daria and a first year student( Maria Sergeyeva) presented their joint project on researching an online community of fic writers, i.e. fans of popular culture products (TV shows, movies, books) who write their own stories using the characters from the original source works.

Stas Pozdnyakov and Viktor Karepin presented their project on interactions between the researchers working in the area of Computational Social Science on Twitter. They also included the data of the joint publications of these researchers in their study.

Professor Snijders gave his comments and suggestions for improving the research projects. On the next day, Friday March 13th, he gave an open lecture titled Network Dynamics and Co-evolution of Networks and Behaviour. He talked about building models of the interactions between people and of their influence on each other. He used addiction to alcohol and smoking as an example for explaining the basic principles of network evolution. At the end of his lecture, Professor Snijders answered questions from the audience, and expressed his sentiment that this meeting was very productive.