From (a)Wake to Woke to Anti-Woke: A Diachronic Analysis of the Evolution of Discourse About ‘Woke’ Through the Hashtag #Woke on X

‘Woke’, a politically polarized term that has sparked controversies on social media,
has semantically evolved over time. To trace this evolution, this study conducted
a diachronic corpus-based analysis of contributions on X (formerly Twitter) using
the hashtag #Woke, dated between 2014 and 2023. The collected data were treated
as two sets of corpora for data analysis, covering the time periods 2014–2018 and
2019–2023. First, the keyword analysis indicated that the semantic bleaching of
‘woke’ became evident since the first time period. Second, the diachronic analysis
using dispersion plots highlighted the shifts in topics semantically associated with
‘woke’ over 10 years. On the one hand, the issue of racism has ‘always’ been central
to the trajectory of the term ‘woke’, and as such has constantly shaped its framing
within anti-woke discourse on X. On the other hand, there was a discernable
shift in the focus of the discourse from power-coercive politics to issues of gender
equality, a topic serving as a vehicle for discussing broader peripheral issues. Beyond
providing a nuanced understanding of the evolution of the semantic scope of
‘woke’, this study, by utilizing dispersion plots rather than traditional frequencybased
keyword analysis, offers new methodological insights and implications for
future diachronic research.