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