Refugees’ social media activities in Turkey: A computational analysis and demonstration method

Abstract

This study performs a data analysis on refugees in Turkey based on their social media activities. In order to achieve this, we first propose a method to find their relevant public accounts and collect their activities generating a dataset. Then, we perform spatial and temporal analysis over this dataset to shed light on the most important topics and events discussed in social networks. We present the results graphically for ease of understanding and comparison. Our results indicate that we can reveal the most shared topics over a specific time and place as well as the change of pattern in refugees’ activities through their reflection on social media. Moreover, this dataset facilitates a number of further and deeper analyses of the refugees in Turkey.