VISUALLY ENHANCED SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSIS OF REFUGEES IN TURKEY

Year 2018, Volume: 60 Issue: 2, 83 - 102, 01.08.2018

Abdullah Bülbül , Salah Haj Ismail

Abstract

The
population of refugees in Turkey is significantly growing since 2014 and it has
already exceeded three millions. This situation urges to study their conditions
and issues as well as their opinions. In this study, we propose a method to
analyze the dataset collected from social media accounts of refugees in Turkey
in a textual and visual manner. Firstly, we acquire social media activities of
refugees, and then we make textual analysis for which the results are presented
using word clouds. Finally, for the most significant words obtained from the
textual analysis, we perform a visual analysis to find out the most
representative image or a group of images shared in social networks. The
association between textual and visual results enhances their perceptibility
and help decreasing the ambiguity of inferences over analysis results. We
experimented with different scenarios and suggested several methods to enhance
computational and qualitative results.

Keywords

social media, visual analysis, image features, refugees, Turkey

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