A Comparative Study of English Feminism and Korean Feminism on Twitter with N-Gram Analysis

초록

This paper analyzes ‘feminism’ and ‘페미니즘’ on Twitter as social media in English and in Korean to discover spectral differences in two cultural societies utilizing N-gram analysis of texts, i.e. in unigrams, bigrams and trigrams. There are limited studies done questioning the two keywords on social media platforms, thus this study will stress its precedence in a quantitative way. From the experimental findings in this study, the English and the Korean data’s most frequent bigrams and trigrams in general show the use of the word feminism with varied contexts. As for comparative results, the English bigrams have ‘intersectional, feminism’ and ‘white, feminism’ which have been popularized in the West and it is interpreted as multi-factional rather than gender-polarizational, but in the Korean bigrams, which top bigrams are ‘여성, 페미니즘’ (women, feminism) and ‘래디컬, 페미니즘’ (radical, feminism), are interepreted as bi-polarizational and gender-polarizational. The English trigrams have ‘saudi, arabia, feminism’ and ‘like, rule, feminism’ displaying more or less big social movements in society, but the Korean trigrams ‘정리, 뉴스, 페미니즘’ (adjustment, news, feminism) and ‘오빠, 허락, 페미니즘’ (male friend, permission, feminism), display specific events in society and still centered in gender-polarization.

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