Significance of protesters’ words during Gezi Park protests: finding implicit meanings in sticky notes and tweets

On 28 May 2013, an impromptu occupation in Istanbul's Gezi Park turned into a nation-wide protest encompassing diverse forms of discontent towards the government. This study explores protesters' accounts of their experiences. We examine these experiences using two lines of inquiry - how did the participants of the Gezi Park protests use linguistic cues when writing at the park and how did those writings differ from personal reflections posted on Twitter? Using a narrative inquiry framework, we employed significance analysis on short narratives written on sticky notes in the Gezi Park and a sample of tweets posted during the protests. Narrators of the sticky notes responded to two prompts: 'before the resistance' and 'after the resistance.' Results revealed that participants in the Park used low rates of cognitive and affective expressions, and negations in the after-narratives. The after-narratives were then compared with tweets posted on Twitter. Analysis of tweets showed higher rates of intensifiers and cognitive expressions, and notably less affective expressions than the after-narratives written on sticky notes. The differences in participants' accounts are discussed in relation to qualities of technologies individuals were using, social contexts, potential audiences, and the country's sociopolitical history.