Text analysis of Maxpark and LiveJournal Russia: How is the evaluation of modern femininity and masculinity discussed in Russian blogs

Abstract: This thesis focuses on text analysis of Russian speaking blogs with the goal to examine critically discussions of femininity and masculinity in modern Russian society. The data corpora are comprised of blogs and comment entries from websites Maxpark.com and LiveJournal Russia. The central question of this research asks if the degree of patriarchal values remains higher in the evaluation of femininity concepts in comparison to masculinity. A combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches is used in data analysis to detect key topics of discussion within the research question. The quantitative modes of inquiry in this research are such methods of text analysis as keyword extraction, collocations, feature extraction (sentiment analysis) and text visualization. The qualitative part includes classic literary and linguistic analysis together with intuition.