Katie Kuksenok

Katie Kuksenok is a PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.  She was a visiting pre-doctoral candidate at CMDS in the summer of 2014. She is analyzing the use of language as performance of national identity in Ukraine during political unrest.  Do some users consistently begin to use Ukrainian more after particularly traumatic events? How long does the effect last? Is using one language rather than the other correlate with particular topics, even if looking at the same set of users? Is talking about violence or mourning deaths more associated with using Ukrainian, perhaps in solidarity, relative to talking about Putin, in a public politicized space in Kiev? Since Ukraine gained sovereignty in 1990, the country has struggled economically, politically, and socially. When it was a part of the USSR, Russian was a dominant language; after the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian began to be mandatory in schools in some regions but not others, and the intentional and accidental use of Ukrainian vs Russian vs “surzhyk” mixing became a core part of the performance and perception of a national Ukrainian identity - or a signaling of the rejection of a distinct Ukrainian identity.

During her period at CMCS she conductes a quantitative and qualitative study of Twitter content. The goal is to discover and characterize quantitatively the relative change of their language patterns before vs after key events using Twitter data, relating it to language use phenomena reflecting identity struggles of this post-Soviet state as previously understood through qualitative research. While the quantitative analysis characterizes language use trends, it is necessary to speak to individuals – ascribing to different political ideologies – to understand the cultural significance of language use during these events.