Tracing the Proliferation of Socialist Realism Doctrine in Latvian Periodicals: Case Study of "Literature and Art" and "The Flag"

Abstract

The paper presents the results of a study on the dissemination of socio-political and aesthetic ideas of Socialist Realism doctrine in the Latvian periodicals Literature and Art (LitArt) and The Flag. Several programmatic, ideologically saturated articles that were published in The Flag in the 1940s were compared to the rest of the corpus to explore the proliferation and persistence of similar ideas in the course of following decades. Authors have employed methodologies commonly used for plagiarism detection: fingerprinting and the comparison of document similarity based on word embeddings and document similarity measures. In particular, three perspectives were used to examine the similarity and reuse of texts: comparison of matching 5-grams processed by the winnowing algorithm and comparison of documents based on the TF-IDF and Doc2Vec embeddings and cosine similarity metrics. To facilitate the analysis, the results were loaded in the open-source version of Neo4j graph database. The findings were further explored and evaluated qualitatively to identify the distribution of direct citations, frequently reused phrases and most similar documents.