%T Religion and Spirituality on Social Media in the Aftermath of the Global Pandemic
%A Olanrewaju Tahir Aduragba
%A Jialin Yu
%A Alexandra I Cristea
%V 2023
%B Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)
%P 5704-5713
%D 2024
%S IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)
%I IEEE
%K Social data mining, Natural language processing, Twitter
%J 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)
%L discovery10187976
%C Sorrento, Italy
%X 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.
%O This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.