The ‘Spiritual’ and the ‘Religious’ in the Twittersphere
A Topic Model and Semantic Map
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20254271 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fabian Winiger (0000-0003-3799-4523, University of Zurich), Gerold Schneider (0000-0002-1905-6237, University of Zurich), Janis Goldzycher (University of Zurich), David Neuhold (0000-0001-5016-9136, University of Lucerne), Simon Peng‐Keller (0000-0001-5738-3653, University of Zurich), Simon Peng-Keller |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-22 |
| Publication date | 2025-03-21 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Religion Media and Digital Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2588-8099 • E-ISSN: 2165-9214 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1163/21659214-bja10123 |
| OpenAlex | W4408835723 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 26 |
One of the principal challenges of religious studies is the lack of a widely accepted normative definition of the terms ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality.’ Responding to recent calls for methodological innovation in this field, in this paper we present a “bottom-up” approach to outlining these concepts based on an interdisciplinary, usage-based approach, which combines qualitative analysis with methods of distributional semantics. Based on the Firthian principle that a word may be known “by the company it keeps,” we used a convenience sample of 138,000 Tweets gathered between March and April 2021 to calculate seven clusters of terms related to ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion.’ Three authors then coded these clusters to propose a tentative name for each. An unsupervised sentiment analysis was conducted and presented on a concept map. We suggest that the Twitter (now ‘X’) data at hand echoes the popular perception of ‘spirituality’ as a positively connoted term, which contrasts with a negatively connoted ‘religion.’ However, the data may be interpreted to arrive at more nuanced and, at times, contradictory interpretations
Linguistics · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Philosophy · Psychology · Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining · Social Media and Politics
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| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |