For a final project in my "Islam in Western Contexts" class, I decided to explore the English-language discourse surrounding Islam and Muslims on Twitter. In class we had discussed how Orientalism can be perpetuated by traditional print and broadcast media. As social media are beginning to fill similar roles as traditional media platforms, I wanted to compare the discourse. I used the Twitter streaming API to gather tweets and used network visualizations and content analysis to understand how Orientalism was a characteristic of social media discourse. Using a hashtag co-occurrence graph, I looked for evidence of bot influence. I then qualitatively coded tweets to elicit Orientalist themes.
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