POLITICAL CONTENT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN THE ONLINE SPACE OF MODERN STATES: METHODOLOGY OF THE ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH PRACTICES

N.A. Ryabchenko, V.V. Katermina, A.A. Gnedash, O.P. Malysheva  pp.139-162

Abstract. The online space, which is characterized by boundless opportunities of communication, as well as the ways to restrict information flows, nowadays is the basic ground for constructing and functioning of different social movements, including their function of producing political content. These movements due to their active (constructive and/ or deconstructive) online and offline activity cannot be studied with classical methods of analysis. Our study focuses on the development of the three-stage methodology of political content research, produced in the online space by current social movements. The developed original methodology includes the use of structural network analysis (quantitative research and modelling of a social movement in the form of a social graph), relational analysis (qualitative analysis of network data of the constructed social graph), linguistic and discourse analysis (implications, discourses, repertoires and norms of a social movement). An approbation of the three-stage methodology of the analysis is performed on the basis of the research of the one of the most massive (global, regional and local framework) and proactive social movements of the present time — the Women’s March Movement. We used structural network analysis of network data in Twitter, a social microblogging service, sampled from January to June 2018 to construct a network  model of the Women’s March Movement and visualize it as a social graph. We applied relational analysis to the constructed graph to identify and describe the discussion core «Women’s March», which is the aggregate of clusters, determining the main directions of the discourse of the Women’s March Movement. Linguistic and discourse analysis of the sampled clusters was applied as semantic and discourse analysis of tags and hashtags (folksonomy analysis) of the constructed discussion core of the political content, produced by the Women’s March social movement. The applied methodology provides a range of research opportunities: to analyze any social movement as regards its stability as a network entity; to visualize the structure of the movement (actors, sub-communities, core, peripherals, participants, proponents, content consumers); to identify qualitative characteristics, which determine interactions inside the community/ movement as well as interactions with the outside environment; to determine potential points of growth and vectors of social movement transformation both in the online and offline space; to predict further development of the movements and the nature of its activities both in the online and offline space.

Key words: political content, social movements, network communities, structural network analysis, relational analysis, linguistic and discourse analysis, hashtags, the online space, social media.