"Deputies Cartography" on the Material of the Stenograms of the Sittings of the State Duma

Abstract

Public speeches of the deputies of the Russian Federation State Duma represent productive empirical material that requires an interdisciplinary approach to its analysis. The goal of the reported study is defining the degree of the concord regarding the future of Russia among deputies and the localization of this agreement in the semantic space (equilibrium point). The empirical base under consideration comprises the transcripts of Russian Federation State Duma sittings. This dataset covers time period from 1994 to mid-2020 and includes 324 thousand phrases (27 million words) from 2773 deputies and other people. The paper presents the general design of the study of the State Duma deputies discourse using the "Semograph" information system, the SlovNet library for natural language text processing based on deep learning, the SciVi visual analytics platform, the map visualization module based on the Leaflet library, the geocoding of geographic objects based on the OpenStreetMap map provider and other tools. The application of the approach showed the importance of the institutional foundations of the symbolic deputies' mapping of the regions of the Volga Federal District (the electoral connection of a deputy with the region – deputies elected by party list or pluralist rule).