Online Petition Analysis of South Korea

Research Question Do online petitions merely serve as a vent for temporary frustration, or do they reflect deep-seated structural societal fractures? This project initiated my transition from sociology to computational social science, driven by the desire to quantify public grievance. Theoretical Framework & Methodology I curated a dataset of online petitions from the South Korean presidential website spanning three years (2017–2020). Grounded in Anthony Giddens' Structuration Theory, I hypothesized that the semantic content of these petitions would mirror social structures and issues such as cultural lags: areas where social reality moves faster than institutional law. Key Insights Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), I mapped the landscape of Korean social conflict. The results revealed that digital petitions were not random noise but structured responses to specific systemic failures: predominantly digital sex crimes, patriarchy, and political polarization. Comparing the petition contents with those of the White House E-petition, We the People, revealed cultural differences. Academic Evolution What began as a student research project involving messy, unstructured data scraping evolved into an academic contribution. I refined the methodology over several years, leading to a presentation at the International Postgraduate Academic Conference 2021 and eventual publication in the journal PLOS ONE in 2024.