From Protests on the Streets to a War in the East: Evolution of Discourse in a Prolonged Crisis

In January 2014, what started as peaceful protests in Kyiv, Ukraine escalated into an ousting of the Ukrainian president, then annexation of Crimea, and a protracted war between the new Ukrainian government and Russian-backed separatists. Meanwhile, Ukrainian citizens documented their experiences on Twitter, leading to the creation of multitudes of conversation spaces, or online publics, that evolved alongside the conflict they were discussing. We collected tweets in those conversations from December 2013 to August 2015. In this work, we use a novel, LDA-based topic tracking tool to analyze how the conversations evolved during the crisis in Ukraine, and the factors associated with this volatility. As existing tools often do not support researchers in pinpointing when online publics shift from one conversation to another, we discuss how our tool can be used to extract cleaner data from longitudinal crises. Finally, we discuss how our discursive analysis of Ukraine in 2014 provides insight on the current conflict in Ukraine.