IAMCR 2014: Live Journal started buzzing about nationalism in Ukraine a year before the protests began

LINIS Senior Researcher Svetlana Bodrunova has took a part in one of the largest and most important conferences in the field of media — IAMCR 2014. This year the conference was held in Hyderabat (India), and one of the main speakers was a prominent media researcher Manuel Castells.

Traditionally, at IAMCR scientists have presented their papers in the field of communication studies. Svetlana Bodrunova also has made a presentation. In particular, the LINIS researcher has described the mapping ethnic discourse in the Russian blogosphere. It is also a project, which Sveblana Bodrunova works on along with LINIS colleagues.

 «I have reported the preliminary results of the automatic study and included our proposals for improving the analysis of nature texts by thematic modeling. Also I have presented some of the results of coding a particular sample of texts,» — Bodrunova says.

The researchers have come to interesting conclusions about what users talk about ethnicity, how they talk about it and how large the scope of this discourse, and also weather this topic is important for the blogosphere.

As it turned out, the subject is important — from 9 to 15% of texts include ethnonyms or words that are close to it. Further analysis showed that there are stable themes and it appears each time when dataset goes through the algorithm. «These topics are well-decorated, despite the fact that the sampale consists a huge amount of texts» — explains Bodrunova. As a result, it was found that on LiveJournal appeared two themes — pronatsionaliticheskaya and antinationalist — a year before of the beginning of the protests in Ukraine. Analysis of the data also showed that the context which ethnicity discussed in, very politicized in blogs.

At the moment LINIS researchers prepare a number of publications on this topic.