Fine-Tuning Protest Event Analysis: Collecting Participant-Generated Event Data and Protest Slogans in an Internet Age. The PEPS database

Abstract

[enter Abstract Body]A description and discussion of the PEPS database of data relating to protest events in (or relating to) Russia. PEPS stands for “protest events, photos, and slogans.” It is not just a data set, but also a repository of first- and second-hand sources. It began as an effort to collect data (much of it in real time) about the protest cycle that started in response to electoral fraud in the elections to the Russian Duma in December 2011 and ultimately died down in January 2013. The database has been used in a number of publications in several languages. PEPS focuses on Russia outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the two cities that are vastly overrepresented in both quantitative and qualitative studies of protest in Russia. We also include events organized by Russian activists abroad. The database currently includes 967 individual events in 237 places and 5,380 slogans for the period between November 2011 and January 2013 (as well as nine later events). This paper presents PEPS in the context of existing protest event analysis (PEA) projects for the Russian case and beyond. We then discuss some of the difficulties we faced in our data collection efforts, and argue that this may be relevant to assessing the accuracy and validity of other existing data sets and databases.