Changes in the Topical Structure of Russian-Language LiveJournal: The Impact of Elections 2011

Abstract

This study investigates the topical structure of the Russian-language blog-publishing service LiveJournal and the change in it that occurred in the course of the public activity after the State Duma elections in December 2011 as compared to a previous “control” period (November 27-December 27 and August 15-September 15 respectively). The data for both periods have been automatically obtained from 2000 top-rated blogs on the basis of ratings published by LiveJournal. Unsupervised topic modelling of the sampled posts was done using Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm. In December 2011 we found considerable growth in weights of all the topics closely associated with the discussion of voting results and protests, accompanied by a more moderate decrease in the majority of other social topics. The number of users who started posting texts that may be conventionally qualified as political according to LDA in December 2011, considerably outnumbers the number of those who ceased posting political items, which may indicate the existence of a blogger mobilization process in political topics.

Keywords: Internet media, blogs, political mobilization, Russia, topic modeling, LDA