This repository contains the supplementary materials for the study "Arabic Tweets in Turkish Twittersphere: Cultural Repertoire and Symbolic Boundaries." This research investigates the cultural repertoires and symbolic boundaries employed by Arabs to include or exclude Turks within the Turkish Twittersphere, focusing on Arabic tweets mentioning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
- arabic_tweets_in_turkish_twittersphere.docx: The full article text detailing the study, its methodology, results, and discussions.
- arabic_tweets_preprocessing_erd_tweets_filtering.ipynb: The Jupyter Notebook containing the code used for filtering out Turkish accounts and filtering Erdogan-related tweets.
- stance_analysis_and_topic_modeling_colab_code.ipynb: The Jupyter Notebook containing the code used for topic modeling. This notebook includes data preprocessing and topic modeling using BERT.
The study leverages generative AI-aided stance analysis and topic modeling to identify the symbolic boundaries drawn using historical narratives, primarily centered on the Ottoman Empire. It explores both positive and negative stances towards Erdoğan, revealing different emphases reflecting nationalist and religious perspectives.
- Symbolic Boundaries: Mechanisms used by groups to include or exclude individuals based on cultural repertoires.
- Cultural Repertoires: Narratives and events drawn from history used to construct symbolic boundaries.
- Stance Analysis: Methodology to determine the author's attitude towards a specific target in text.
- Topic Modeling: Technique used to discover abstract topics within a collection of documents.
- Data Collection: Tweets were sourced from the Politus project, focusing on Arabic tweets mentioning "Erdoğan."
- Stance Annotation: Using ChatGPT 4, tweets were classified into positive, negative, and neutral stances.
- Topic Modeling: BERT model was used to identify and name topics from the tweets with positive and negative stances.
- Positive stance tweets often highlighted Erdoğan's Muslim identity and political strength, portraying him as a competent in-group member.
- Negative stance tweets depicted Erdoğan through the lens of Ottoman colonialism, framing him as an out-group member with varying levels of competence.
- Both positive and negative narratives drew from the Ottoman cultural repertoire, with differing emphases.