Equestrian Discourse in Korean News Media (2020-2025): Insights from Big Kinds Text Analysis

This study aims to analyze South Korean news coverage from 2020 to 2025 to understand how the equestrian industry is portrayed in the media and identify key issues. To achieve this, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling was employed to extract major themes from equestrian-related articles. The analysis categorized the news into six core topics: youth education and experience programs, domestic equestrian competitions and regional events, equestrian tourism and leisure industry, incidents in the equestrian and broader sports sectors, international sports events and global issues, and the horse racing industry and race culture. This study is meaningful in that it uses big data-based text analysis to empirically identify significant issues in the equestrian industry. Based on the findings, the study provides implications for sustainable growth and the popularization of equestrian sports. Further research should explore economic impacts, cross-national comparisons of competition operations, and evaluations of equestrian education programs.