Abstract

Abstract The fire that destroyed a large part of the world-famous Notre Dame Cathedral in France in April 2019 shocked the world. A lively expression of thoughts and feelings during and after the fire arose on Twitter. In this article, we will analyze the discourses about the Notre Dame fire on Twitter, with a specific focus on emoji, focusing on the thoughts and feelings emoji express and how they convey the meanings religious buildings have for people. Based on a dataset of almost 2 million tweets collected in the week following the incident, this paper leverages a variety of computational and qualitative methods to explore the topic from different angles. Temporal analysis and topic modelling show the dynamics of emoji usage, which drastically changes after a few days from expressing sorrow to expressing skepticism. Semantic analysis using the word2vec model reveals the implicit meaning of potentially ambiguous emoji characters.

Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call