In Russia of 2006–2013, grassroots political activity and its radicalization have both risen rapidly (Bodrunova&Litvinenko 2013). Urban ethnic conflicts with Caucasian-origin resettlers and emigrants from ex-Soviet states, including Moscow of 2010–2013, have created new research agendas focused on mapping and prognosis of current ethnic attitudes. The project aims at mapping current ethnic attitudes in the Russian-language Livejournal community by big data research methods, Livejournal selected for its ‘platform for Runet elite’ image (Gorny 2004). To dig the topicality of ethnic-oriented discussions, topic modeling based on innovative interval semi-supervised LDA (ISLDA) algorithm is used, with substantially bigger capacity vs. regular LDA to extract interpretable topics related to ethnicity (Bodrunova et al. 2013). To interpret the topics, framing theory is used: ‘politicized vs. ritualized ethnicities’ (Krejci&Velimsky 1981) semi-automated frame analysis and manual discourse analysis are deployed, altogether forming a mixed quality-assessment method for LDA topics. Factors influencing ‘politicization/ritualization’ are suggested.
