Data driven studies: conceptualizing first Russian practices

The following forum portion of this special issue is the result of the first in Russia an academic event series initiated by the ‘Russian Journal of Communication’ – an event that, if we may be so bold, almost performs in the event organization complexity the explicit theme of data turn and human and professional ethics that its contributors take on. Namely, what data driven communication means for Russian scholars in philosophy, political and media studies. The following materials are the outcome of a series of several scholarly meetings spread throughout leading universities throughout Russia – in Moscow at the Philosophy Faculty at Lomonosov Moscow State University, in Saint Petersburg at the Applied Political Science Department at National Research University Higher School of Economics with the support of the Russian Association of Political Science, the Research Committee on Public Politics and Civil Society Problems and TransRegion Humanitarian and Politology Center ‘Strategy’, in Kazan, Tatarstan – at the Higher School of Journalism and Media Communication at Kazan Federal University. Underlying these open forums is commitment to raising public concerns and advancing scholarly questions about the changing world of data driven communication studies and ethics in Russia. These discussions were organized and moderated by Dr Anna Kostikova (Lomonosov Moscow State University), Prof. Grygory Tulchinsky (Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg) and Dr Leonid Tolchinsky (Kazan Federal University). All the discussions were supported by the ‘Russian Journal of Communication’ editor-in-chief Prof. Igor Klyukanov, Dr Ben Peters, Dr Robert Couch and Prof. Marina Shilina. It’s not expected that forum will lead to intellectual coherence or terse summary; we hope for just the opposite. May everyone find here a wide range of arenas in which data and ethical behavior cannot be separated: at their heart of each contribution and its surrounding conversations beats the question how human relations (or, what it means to be human) interacts with data-lit transformations where humans abide (or, what it means to be data).