Social media has become an environment for the emergence of new forms of religious activity.They are a very promising field for the sociological research of religious activity and identity. Actually, digital religion is a new agenda in the Sociology of Religion and Digital Social Studies. At the same time, this field is connected to the methodological and technical problems of "Big Data" and studies of social networks with its weak structured and increasing volume. "VKontakte" is the most popular social network in Russia with more than 380 million users. So, digital sociological research increasingly requires application of modelling in the form of network structures; it allows obtaining valuable information on general regularities of interaction between community members and comparing different social groups. The article attempts to analyse a number of important topographic characteristics for creation of the graph model of Buddhist communities in the social networking service "VKontakte". The authors have investigated assortativity, the degrees of vertices, and the lengths of the shortest paths for the friendship graph of Russian Buddhists. It is shown that currently there is a significant growth of the Buddhist segment of social networking service, a number of Buddhist communities and Buddhist users are increasing. This segment as a whole reproduces social networking characteristics, but Buddhism is not an assortative feature, and Buddhist communities are weakly structured and influenced by many differentiating factors.
INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE "THE HERITAGE OF RINCHEN NOMTOEV -THE OUTSTANDING BURYAT SCIENTIST-PHILOLOGIST, LITERATOR, ENLIGHTENER (on the 200 th anniversary of the birth)"
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.