about prep., adv.

1.who I am

My name is Snezhana Galimova. I am a second-year master’s student in sociology at Sorbonne University, on the applied track “Sociological research: consulting, surveys, evaluation” (chargé·e d’études sociologiques). Before that I completed a bachelor’s degree in sociology at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.

My fields of interest are the sociology of education and the sociology of migration. I work with qualitative and quantitative methods: interviews, surveys, desk research and statistical analysis in R. My native language is Russian; I am fluent in French and English.

2.working with data

Alongside my studies, I have worked for several years at a company that develops software for clinical trials: coordinating projects, collecting and structuring data, analysing user needs. In clinical trials a data error is costly, so data handling follows strict rules: every record carries its author and date, raw data is never overwritten, every change is kept with its reason, and access is split by role.

3.why corpus

In academic sociology projects it is usually the opposite: transcripts, surveys, spreadsheets, references and consent forms are scattered across programs and folders, and what links them is file names and memory. When a supervisor asks where a figure or a quote comes from, the answer has to be reconstructed by hand.

corpus brings these two experiences together: one platform for the whole sociological study, with the data rules of clinical trials built into the tool itself rather than demanding extra effort. Data is hosted in France.

4.the project

corpus is a personal, independent project; it is not affiliated with the university where I study or with my employer. I decide what the platform should do and how, based on the practice of sociological research, and I am responsible for the product. The current version is 0.6; the next step is a pilot with research teams. The interface is available in French, English and Russian.

“Research is not only its conclusions, but everything they are made of.”

5.other projects

garbage of Paris — my personal photography project, since 2022. I photograph rubbish on the streets of Paris — bags, objects, traces — where it was left. It is first of all an aesthetic project; a sociological eye is present — what discarded things say about private life brought out into public space — but it makes no claim to methodological rigour and has no connection with corpus. garbageofparis.fr ↗

диспозитив — a channel on the sociology of everyday life (in Russian), one concept per video. soon