An Empirical Study on the Public Perception Characteristics of Jiangxi Province's Intangible Cultural Heritage from the Perspective of Social Media

Exploring the public's cognitive status, participation level, and emotional tendency towards intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is conducive to gaining insights into the public's attitudes and needs towards traditional culture, and provides a key basis for accurately formulating intangible cultural heritage protection and inheritance strategies. This paper crawls ICH text data from microblogs, adopts word frequency analysis, theme mining, emotion classification and other methods to excavate the deeper meaning of the text, and explores the public's real concerns, emotional attitudes and their formation mechanisms, and the results show that: 1) the public's perception of the ICH presents a multi-dimensional feature, and through theme analysis, it is found that the public discussion mainly focuses on three dimensions: cultural inheritance and development (52%), implementation and experience of the activities (32%), and introduction and promotion of ICH (16%). Among them, the proportion of topics related to the introduction and promotion of ICH is relatively low in microblogging, and it is suggested that the relevant departments increase the publicity and promotion of specific ICH. 2) The results of the sentiment analysis show that positive sentiments dominate the public's sentiment towards ICH. The average value of sentiment in each region exceeds 0.67 (out of 1), with Jiujiang City (0.8) and Ganzhou City (0.79) significantly leading the way. 3) Spatial econometric analysis reveals significant regional differences in the distribution of ICH sentiment. This difference was jointly influenced by multiple factors, of which the number of ICHs, GDP, and education expenditure level were the three most explanatory influences, with regression coefficients of 0.911,0.906, and 0.897 (p<0.01), respectively. This finding provides an important reference for the development of differentiated ICH protection policies.