Sentiment Analysis of Sema Shows in the Context of Cultural Tourism: Istanbul, Cappadocia, Konya Comparison

Abstract

Sema; it is defined as a ceremony that symbolizes the degrees of the path to reach God, contains religious elements and themes, and as such has detailed rules and qualities. “Mevlevi whirling ceremonies” were declared as the Intangible Cultural Heritage masterpiece that must be preserved by UNESCO in 2005. After this date, global awareness towards sema shows has increased. The main aim of this study is to evaluate the Sema shows within the scope of cultural tourism according to the perspectives of foreign tourists. For this purpose, foreign tourist comments consisting of two businesses in Istanbul and Nevşehir / Cappadocia and digital texts of Konya Mevlana Show Center were collected from Tripadvisor. The collected data was evaluated by using emotion analysis and clustering technique, which is one of the text mining methods. According to the results of the sentiment analysis, the average of the positive perspectives of the tourists regarding the shows was significantly higher (77%). According to the results of the cluster analysis, the perceptions of foreign tourists for all three shows were high in the “Cultural” dimension, then in the “Spiritual” and “Touristic show” dimensions, respectively.