‘Moving to Jeju’: An Exploratory Keyword Analysis Using Social Big Data

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to analyze the keyword for the title ‘Moving to Jeju’ on online social networks through big data analysis methodology. There has been a steady population increase in Jeju with the influx of local people in recent years. It is necessary to seek the link between migration and tourism to understand the possibility and the implication to utilize its data for tourism sectors on Jeju Island from an economic standpoint. Research design, data, and methodology - This study used 3,250 keywords related to ‘Moving to Jeju’ from 25,052 text data sets for six years from 2013 to 2018 on blog titles of NAVER and DAUM, the two most popular online channels in Korea. The selected data sets from 10,722 of blog postings during the periods were ranked by their frequencies in EXCEL and pre-processed in the TEXTOM. The co-occurrence matrix of manually cleaned texts were produced in the KrKwic. The matrix then was used as an input file to UCINET for the CONCOR analysis. Results - Over the six years, there have been 44 words that have appeared more than 20 times a year. Up to seven out of the top 20 words are related to tourism such as travel, restaurant, story, café, Aewol, pension and tourist attraction. The CONCOR analysis produced eight clusters. Most of the keywords in clusters 7 and 8 are closely related to tourism resources or tourism activities for visitors, such as ‘Oreum, Ole, tourist attraction, gourmet restaurant, guest house, recommendation, Udo, café, Aewol, travel, and beach.’ Conclusions - This study revealed that the keyword, ‘Moving to Jeju’ is closely related to Jeju tourism as much as the issue is directly related to the influx of the population, which can be a foundation of Jeju economy. The keywords frequency analysis clearly showed that the interest of ‘Moving to Jeju’ has been dramatically increased despite of population decline in 2018. Also, given that the word staying a month is consistently superior, it suggests that the duration of the stay is an important concept that is considered in both tourism and migration.