Analysis of Regional Smart Tourism Status Using Topic Modeling and Network Analysis: Focused on News Articles

This study aims to analyze the current status of smart tourism in various regions. To achieve this, 599 news articles containing the keyword 'smart tourism' were collected from national daily newspapers in the BigKinds database, covering the period from January 2014 to June 2024. The collected data was subject to topic modeling based on location, and network analysis was performed using the keyword frequencies in each topic. The topic modeling results identified six major topics: 'Jeju,' 'Incheon,' 'Daegu_Busan_Ulsan,' 'Gyeongju,' 'Suwon,' and 'Yangyang.' It was found that the development of smart tourism in all these regions is centered around tourism projects led by government and local authorities. The network analysis results revealed that 'platform' and 'content' are key keywords related to smart tourism technology across all topics, indicating that these concepts are interconnected to provide services to individual tourists. The findings of this study are expected to provide valuable information for formulating policies and strategies to promote smart tourism in various regions and contribute to the realization of sustainable smart tourism.