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Image of Journal of Applied Nonlinear Dynamics
ISSN:2325-6192 (print)
ISSN:2325-6206 (online)
Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management
António Mendes Lopes (editor), Jiazhong Zhang(editor)
António Mendes Lopes (editor)

University of Porto, Portugal

Email: aml@fe.up.pt

Jiazhong Zhang (editor)

School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi Province 710049, China

Fax: +86 29 82668723 Email: jzzhang@mail.xjtu.edu.cn

Revealing Environmental Discourses in Online Communities: Topic Mining for Analysis of Public Agenda

Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management 11(2) (2023) 225--241 | DOI:10.5890/JEAM.2023.06.007

Konstantin Platonov$^{1}$, Kirill Svetlov$^{2}$

$^{1}$ Higher School of Economics, 190121 Saint Petersburg, Russia

$^{2}$ Saint Petersburg State University, 191124 Saint Petersburg, Russia

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Abstract

Environmental discourses in modern Russia are extremely diverse and controversial in their agendas and topics they discuss. Diversity shows itself in all communication channels and platforms including social media and on-line communities in particular. Social networking sites are becoming a sig-nificant source of data presenting the current trending topics and debates related to environmental issues. In this study, we investigate data from popular Russian social networking site VKontakte to understand what types of discourses are disseminated in it. The dataset of 250490 posts published on eco-related online communities in timeframe between 1.01.2017 and 01.05.2021 was collected. In sum, 7 salient clusters representing the main discourses in eco-related agenda were identified and described. Clustering based on the doc2vec algorithm proved to be an effective method to group the communities by related topics. The diversity of eco-related discourses was apparent not only in the differences in topics but also in various goals such as mobilizing, informing, education or awareness-raising. Agendas of clusters also differed in terms of alleged content consumers such as broad audiences or professionals, activists or volunteers.

Acknowledgments

The work of the second author was carried out as part of the project No. 121062300141-5 ``Comprehensive study of factors and mechanisms of political and socio-economic sustainability in the transition to a digital society" funded by Government of the Russian Federation.

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