Narration and its Formation on Twitter in Persian: Analysis of Iranian Users' Twitter Stories during the Kermanshah Earthquake

This article examines how users' narratives are formed and analyzed in Persian Twitter during the earthquake of Kermanshah in 2017. In addition, the prevalent narratives on Persian Twitter will also be identified in this event to determine which users' stories have been hegemonic on this social media. Given that the narratives formed on Twitter are still a new topic for scholars to research, a plausible theoretical framework cannot be found. For this reason, by first reviewing the views on narratives on Twitter, mainly the structuralist model of Luff and Waltzsky (Ochs and Capps' discussion of narrative qualities and narrative approach) is attempted to provide a good theoretical background for the analysis. Also, using the online platform Discovery Text, 23,964 tweets were collected in the first 24 hours after the Kermanshah earthquake in 2017. Then, 15% of the collected tweets were randomly selected and analyzed relying on the critical analysis method of social media discourse. The results showed that there were three types of narration on Twitter: single narratives, reference narratives, and associative narratives. Each of these narratives is discussed in detail in the paper. The results also showed that the reference narratives and the dominant associative narratives are often critical and political.