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

ABSTRACT

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.

Disclosure statement

We have no funding and no known conflict of interest to disclose.

Data availability statement

The study’s pre-registration, draft materials, data, and analysis syntax are available at https://osf.io/p5jnx/.