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 wasreopened for worship on July 24th, 2020 with a Presidential Decree of theRepublic 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 andsentiment analysis of those Tweets, text mining as a sub-branch of datamining is used as a methodology, which is for achieving meaningful informationand outputs from raw data by configuring systematic ordering ofunstructured data by using natural language processing methods andtools. In this research, 102,430 tweets that include Hagia Sophia as a wordand a hashtag from July 10th, 2020 -that the status change of the HagiaSophia was declared- to June 12th, 2021 are resolved and analyzed using thefrequency, sentiment and network analysis. In conclusion, although there aremore positive sentiments than the negative ones, the negative sentiment isclearly a discontent and backlash especially against Turkey and Islam.Furthermore, it becomes clear that Islam is associated with terrorism andradicalism.