Visual representation of a linear tourist destination based on social network photos: a comparative analysis of cross-cultural perspectives

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the development of social networks, user-generated data now have a substantial impact on the visual representation of tourist destinations. As ‘the Belt and Road’ has become China’s long-term national development strategy, linear tourist destinations have gained increasing attention. Due to the peculiarities of the spatial form of linear tourist destinations and the mobile character of dynamic viewing, which make communication and collision between cultures more extensive and deeper, it is valuable to study visual representations of linear tourist destinations from a cross-cultural perspective. This study proposes a mixed methods based on RQDA and mutual information to explore the visual representations of linear tourist destination by Chinese and foreign tourists, sampling photos of the Sichuan Tibet Highway found on social networks. The results show that linear tourism destinations have unique visual representation characteristics due to their own spatial structure and changes in travel modes and tools. There are both similarities and differences in the representations of linear tourist destinations by tourists from different cultural backgrounds. On the one hand, common elements of visual representations by Chinese and foreign tourists are highlighted in the cross-cultural context; on the other hand, visual representation embeds personal spirit, cultural background, and ideology, forming a relatively subjective place image of the linear tourist destination.