A research project supported by the Incubator Funding of the ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences.
Period of support: March 2025 – February 2026
Principal Investigator: Ildikó Barna
Participants: Márton Gosztonyi, Renáta Németh, Zsófia Rakovics, Domonkos Sik
Summary
In the project, we plan to explore discursive representations of the Russian-Ukrainian war, with a particular focus on the historical analogies that can be found. In a first step, we will use a structural topic model to identify thematic clusters and communication patterns (e.g. argumentative, emotional, descriptive speech acts) and their temporal dynamics. In a second step, we use word embedding methods to investigate how the semantic position and function of Russia and Ukraine have changed in public discourses. The word embedding models can be used to explore semantic structures and to investigate the dynamics of the distances between individual keywords or word pairs. By analysing the variation of the distance between word vectors over time and between different authors of texts (e.g. media, politicians, journalists), we aim to identify social differences in semantic structures. These methods have great potential to reveal previously unknown patterns and relationships within political discourse and to provide new insights into social dynamics. Our database offers the opportunity to examine how narratives about the two countries have been constructed over the long term (2000-2024), differentiated by different layers of the public sphere (parliament, media), political sides (parties) and positions of power (government, opposition).