Experience in testing content analysis in the study of the concept of «Russian idea»

Introduction. The article is devoted to the problem of the formulation of the substantive aspect of the Russian idea. The relevance of the text is determined by the fact that there is still no adequate understanding in the research literature of what should be included in the content of the concept. Moreover, the very existence of the Russian Idea is a problem area for the Russian philosophical tradition.

Materials and Methods. The authors test an original approach to the study of the phenomenon, which consists in the application of quantitative tools to the study of the deep meanings of Russian civilization. The collection of material was carried out on the basis of 26 texts of the representatives of the national thought of different historical epochs and various ideological positions. The basic idea behind the research was the thesis that the Russian idea is a meta-narrative with a 1000-year history, in this regard, the hypothesis was put forward that none of the existing texts can be considered as exhaustive and fully reflecting the concept of the work. On this basis, the authors of the article analyzed all the source texts as separate chapters of a single narrative about the fate of Russian civilization and its role in the world historical process.

Results. The data presented in the article were collected and processed using online resources: https://miratext.ru and https://istio.com/. The similarity of the algorithms of the resources, however, gave different results. As a result of automatic and manual viewing, the top 20 high-frequency and relevant words were formed for each of the sources, the categories were systematized and presented in a tabular version and a word cloud format. It was revealed that, although the analyzed texts are united by a single theme «Russian Idea», no single concept has been found that would be common to all the analyzed sources. The most frequent concepts should be noted as the following: «man», «Russian», «Russia», «life» and «people». These words, according to both programs, were in the top of the combined semantic core of all 26 sources. The study showed that these concepts are unifying for all the texts considered.

Discussion and Conclusions. The presented results demonstrate the prospects of using quantitative methods that allow us to search for mathematical confirmation of the correctness of the semantic content of the Russian idea.

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