Balcony: A remembered architectural element amid pandemic: Evidences from digital media

Abstract

The pandemic has created a global crisis. Governments have taken a number of preventative measures like "stay-at-home" orders to curb the spread of COVID-19. These measures have provided people to rediscover their living spaces. The balcony is one of these places. The balcony has a crucial role in human life and works as a connector in-between space of indoor-outdoor, public-private. However, in the 21st century, it left its glorious old days behind, lost its vitality, and turned into a faded architectural element. Along with the pandemic, the balcony is again on the people's agenda as space symbolizing the new form of freedom. The aim of this study is, on the one hand, to put forth the effects of the pandemic on the popularity of the balcony to employ quantitative analysis of internet search statistics; on the other hand, to reveal how pandemic affects people's perception of the balcony to use sentence-level sentiment analysis.