Cultural City Discourses Change Before and After Designation: Focusing on Gochang, Healing Cultural City

Purpose The purpose of this study is to find out how the discourse on cultural city policy has changed before and after the designation. Cultural cities are aimed to realize the central government's policy that strengthen cultural creativity by effectively mobilizing local cultural resources such as cultural industry, tourism, tradition, history, and visual products, and individual cultural cities are expected to lead role in regional culture based on local cultural assets. This study noted Go chang, the excellent cultural city award winner, in 2023 and 2024. Methods The discourses before and after the designation of Gochang cultural city, which appeared in the media and SNS for about 5 years and 10 months from 2020 to present, were analyzed. In order to derive the discourses, CONCOR analysis was performed basedon word frequency, word centrality, and semantic network. Text collection, refining, and analysis performed by TEXTOM, a big data solution. Results Comparing before and after the designation of a cultural city, notable changes of policy discourse were reveled in wordsfrequency, centrality of frequent words as well as distinct discourses. Prior to the designation of a cultural city, there were discussions on the necessity of designating a cultural city, the role of promotion and the governance with citizens, and the justification of a cultural city overcoming a Pandemic crisis. After the designation, practical discussions such as strengthening organizational functions to secure expertise in project promotion along with the progress of various projects based on the local resources. Conclusion Future discourses are expected to transfer Gochang, the cultural city to more mature discourse generator for sustainability, which will be included such as evaluation discourse on project performance. Limitation of research and suggestion of further study were included in the end of study.