Semantic Network Analysis (SNA) of Media Big Data, Linking Cultural City to Tourism Discourses: Gong-Ju, the Cultural City Case

Purpose: This study is aim to make policy suggestions to secure sustainability in promoting Cultural City policies. Cities discover and reinterpret existing original to secure competitiveness, but cities can survive by creating new cultures. Tourism also contributes to the creation of economic effects by emphasizing industrial aspects, but essentially, tourism plays a role in enjoying the culture of the city and further creating a new culture. Nevertheless, culture and tourism tend to become instrumental and means of urban development, which will be set as a hurdle to sustainable urban development. Methods: The discourse that appeared in the media was analyzed targeting Gong-Ju City, Chung-Nam Province, which was recently designated as a Cultural City. For about 6 years from January 2018 to December 2023, big data on cultural cities and tourism mentioned on media reports and SNS were collected, and discourse was presented through frequent word frequency analysis, centrality analysis, and CONCOR analysis. For data collection, processing, and analysis, a big data solution, TEXTOM was used. Results: A total of 4,030 documents and 17,530 words with the keywords of Gong-Ju, Cultural City, and tourism were collected. In addition to the search keywords, tourism-related travel, tourist cities, and tourists accounted for the high frequency along with words such as culture, travel, Chung-Nam, hosting, and promotion. Centrality analysis revealed culture, city, tourism, region, and history are orient direction of discourse. As a result of the discourse analysis, the orientation of the future cultural city through history, the life-style resources of local residents as cultural resources, policies and programs activation before and after the designation of a cultural city, and the possibility of the tourism industry for a cultural city were extracted. Conclusion: Since Gongju, a Cultural City, was initial stage, there was a limit to discovering how it was connected to regional differentiation and tourism. However, it was suggested how to create a new discourse by linking tourism, focusing on the research results and developmental suggestions through previous studies.