Prospects for studying value orientations of young Russians with regard to digital humanities (based on SIBAS associative database)
Authors: Gritsko Maria I. 
Published: November 2019

The article considers the directions of changes in modern youth’s value orientations as they are detected in the associative-verbal network, a research product of a mass psycholinguistic associative experiment, carried out in Siberia and the Far East, Russia from 2008 to 2013 and accessible in the form of an electronic associative resource known as SIBAS. In the context of the current ethnocultural identification this process tends to become a topical issue.
The study emphasizes the importance of an integrated interdisciplinary approach involving data collection from various social sciences and humanities. One popular trend of today’s cultural linguistic and anthropological paradigm consists in researching modern linguistic processes through linguistic personalities of individual native speakers. So, the article considers some theoretical aspects related to formation of the ethno-cultural identity on the basis of ethnic self-consciousness, represented by a series of images, which include a certain set of elements of ethnicity that differ for each ethnic group. In this regard, the paper considers new tools and methods to retrieve and interpret ethnic socio-cultural meanings, present in the sources of associative images in the form of linguistic reactions characterizing a given ethnic linguistic consciousness. The advantages of the modern electronic associative resources are being substantiated. Continuous addition of psycholinguistic data require an improvement of the search tools and development of ethnosemantic tagging. This may be very helpful to satisfy researchers’ or ordinary user needs. To meet this end, the paper proposes some tentative solutions of tagging which is tailored to the specific tasks of professional cultural linguistic electronic corpora in general, and is apt, in particular, to cope with the challenges of the psycholinguistic material of associative databases such as SIBAS. These are illustrated on the example of two thematic groups (associative fields), "Characteristics of man" and "Types of self-identification". Our main task was to exemplify the semantic taxonomy and the techniques of evaluative tagging meeting the needs of associative databases. The principles of analyzing dynamic characteristics of socio-cultural data related to ethnic selfidentification in youths are considered, too. The author emphasizes advantages of the data from associative sources rather than that found in explanatory dictionaries in order to know with certainty the meaningful cultural connotation of a linguistic item. Comparing semantics of diachronic data from SIBAS and RAS contained in their associative fields "nuzhno" (≈ you have to, you are to…), the author discovered some relevant quantitative and qualitative shifts in value meanings which reflect highly likely new representations of young Russians about life in the context of self-identification. Keywords: language personality, language consciousness, ethno-cultural identification, ethnicity, identification changes, value orientations, evaluation, associative experiment, associative database, semantic evaluation tagging, taxonomic tagging, diachronic analysis.