Religion and Spirituality on Social Media in the Aftermath of the Global Pandemic

December 11, 2022 · Entered Twilight · 🏛 BigData Congress [Services Society]

Repo contents: README.md, __init__.py, analysis, classification, data_collection, language_modeling, prepare_reddit_data.py, prepare_tweet_data.py, preprocess, semantic_search.py, topic_modeling, utils

Authors Olanrewaju Tahir Aduragba, Alexandra I. Cristea, Pete Phillips, Jonas Kurlberg, Jialin Yu arXiv ID 2212.11121 Category cs.CY: Computers & Society Cross-listed cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.SI Citations 3 Venue BigData Congress [Services Society] Repository https://github.com/tahirlanre/covid19-online-religion ⭐ 1 Last Checked 3 months ago

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Church closed its physical doors for the first time in about 800 years, which is, arguably, a cataclysmic event. Other religions have found themselves in a similar situation, and they were practically forced to move online, which is an unprecedented occasion. In this paper, we analyse this sudden change in religious activities twofold: we create and deliver a questionnaire, as well as analyse Twitter data, to understand people's perceptions and activities related to religious activities online. Importantly, we also analyse the temporal variations in this process by analysing a period of 3 months: July-September 2020. Additionally to the separate analysis of the two data sources, we also discuss the implications from triangulating the results.