Group Representation in Soviet Satire (1940-1950)

Abstract

In its most general form, this project explores recurring themes in satirical texts from the journal Krokodil, a long-running and important satirical publication in the Soviet Union.

Previous analysis of how Soviet Jewry was depicted in Krokodil’s satire showed a marked change between the pre- and post-World War II periods. This project aims to expand the focus to and compare the treatment of other notable groups invoked in the publication.

The project first converts Krokodil issues into machine-readable text and then uses several methods for identifying themes or topics. These include topic modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation and clustering texts at various aggregate levels using the BERTopic framework.