Communication Studies, Public Relations, Journalism
I defended my master’s thesis in communication studies in December 2007 at the University of Northern Iowa. My academic advisor was Dr. Dean Kruckeberg. My thesis was on the significance of the general public in a public relations context. The thesis abstract was published in the 10th edition of This is PR.
In my thesis, I used a computational approach to collecting, storing and analyzing empirical data. I wrote a focused crawler, which explored more than 30.000 web pages, discovering relevant data. I used that data to model and analyze a chronological network of a specific discussion in the blogosphere. According to my knowledge, as of January 2008, this has not been done in communication studies. I believe computer science can be applied to research in communication studies in lots of ways; crawling the Web, modeling data networks and analyzing them using methods from information retrieval is just the tip of the iceberg.
Journalism and Public Relations in Russia
My undergraduate degree, or Diploma, was in Journalism and Public Relations from St. Petersburg State University, Russia, which I defended on June 23, 1998.
My academic advisor was Dr. Olga Tulsanova.
My undergraduate thesis was on applied public relations and the field's interplay with mass media. I examined several hundred public relations case studies and developed a typology of special events in public relations.
