Attempt to independently replicate the stylometric study of Navalny's prison texts

Original article in Kyiv Post: https://www.kyivpost.com/analysis/20577

Data

Sources

Data was collected from the following sources: | Source | Source url | Number of posts | | ---------------------|----------------------------------------|-----------------| | Navalny's Blog | https://navalny.com | 2978 | | Navalny's Telegram | https://t.me/navalny | 3152 | | Navalny's Instagram | https://instagram.com/navalny | 2023 | | Volkov's LiveJournal | https://leonwolf.livejournal.com | 402 | | Volkov's Telegram | https://t.me/leonid_volkov | 3664 | | Volkov's Instagram | https://instagram.com/leonidvolkov | 514 | | Sobol's LiveJournal | https://sobollubov.livejournal.com | 230 | | Sobol's Telegram | https://t.me/TeamSobol | 14173 | | Sobol's Instagram | https://instagram.com/sobollubov | 2378 | | Pevchikh's Instagram | https://instagram.com/maria_pevchikh | 106 | | Alburov's Instagram | https://instagram.com/alburov | 717 | | Zhdanov's Telegram | https://t.me/ioannzh | 1581 | | Zhdanov's Instagram | https://instagram.com/ioannzh | 658 | | Yarmysh's Telegram | https://t.me/Kira_Yarmysh | 3577 | | Yarmysh's Instagram | https://instagram.com/kira_yarmysh | 363 | | Navalny's Facebook | https://facebook.com/navalny | 624 | | Volkov's Facebook | https://facebook.com/leonid.m.volkov | 664 | | Sobol's Facebook | https://facebook.com/soboll.ru | 920 | | Alburov's Facebook | https://facebook.com/alburov | 37 | | Zhdanov's Facebook | https://facebook.com/zhdanovivan | 490 |

Collection

Data collection code can be found in data.ipynb.

Note that in order to run the code you will need to populate the credentials directory with files fb_cookies.json, lj_cookies.json containing cookies for the corresponding sites, as well as put your Instagram username and password into the insta_credentials.json.

Be careful, Instagram and Facebook can temporarily ban you if you end up making too many requests.

I used BeautifulSoup to parse scrape posts from navalny.com and LiveJournal, snscrape for Telegram, facebook_scraper for Facebook and ensta for Instagram.

Structure

fbk_archive.csv contains aggregated data as a CSV table with the following columns:

• author: Author of the post
• text: Contents of the post
• date: Date in the format %Y-%m-%d
• url: Link to the original post
• source_type: Link to the source homepage

Disclamers and conflicts of interest

Author (Artur Chakhvadze) is not in any way affiliated with Navalny, FBK, ACF international, Kyiv Post or Oleksiy Borovskiy.

Anna Vellikok, a relative of Georgy Alburov, has promised to buy a beer to the Author as a token of gratitude for replicating the study.

Author does not hold any credentials whatsoever, contents of this repository should be judged on their own merits.