A text mining analysis of the change in status of the Hagia Sophia on Twitter: the political discourse and its reflections on the public opinion


Demirel S., Kahraman E., Gündüz U.

ATLANTIC JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, cilt.1, sa.1, ss.1-29, 2022 (SSCI)

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 1 Sayı: 1
  • Basım Tarihi: 2022
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1080/15456870.2022.2093354
  • Dergi Adı: ATLANTIC JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, Communication & Mass Media Index
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1-29
  • İstanbul Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

The Hagia Sophia served as a museum from November 24th, 1934 until it was

reopened for worship on July 24th, 2020 with a Presidential Decree of the

Republic of Turkey. As a result of the change in status of the Hagia Sophia,

there have been discussions on Twitter. Hence, aiming to present text and

sentiment analysis of those Tweets, text mining as a sub-branch of data

mining is used as a methodology, which is for achieving meaningful information

and outputs from raw data by configuring systematic ordering of

unstructured data by using natural language processing methods and

tools. In this research, 102,430 tweets that include Hagia Sophia as a word

and a hashtag from July 10th, 2020 -that the status change of the Hagia

Sophia was declared- to June 12th, 2021 are resolved and analyzed using the

frequency, sentiment and network analysis. In conclusion, although there are

more positive sentiments than the negative ones, the negative sentiment is

clearly a discontent and backlash especially against Turkey and Islam.

Furthermore, it becomes clear that Islam is associated with terrorism and

radicalism.