Tourists’ Participation on Web 2.0: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Experiences

Abstract

With the advent of Web 2.0, tourists are increasingly documenting their stories/reviews online. This online process of story-telling helps them enhance their experiences. The study demonstrates how tourists’ informal participation on Web 2.0 can contribute to tourism research. We discuss the nature of tourists’ participation on Web 2.0 according to the principles of participatory research. This further helps demonstrate how online data are produced and what characterizes it. Corpus Linguistics (CL) is then applied to extract hidden meanings in data sets in both exploratory studies as well as to test theory. Using this novel approach, we study tourists’ experiences in New Zealand to firstly, identify experience themes, and secondly, predict tourists’ evaluations using a Semantic Differential (SD) model. The methodology provides researchers with the ability not only to compare different destinations according to the experiences they trigger but also to exploit advantages of both qualitative rich data and quantitative analysis.

A Psycholinguistic View of Tourists’ Emotional Experiences

“…The study thus considers the emotional experience as a multicomponent process and not as a unitary phenomenon (Russell 2009; Clore and Ortony 2008; Scherer 2013). While, previously, qualitative research had been difficult to generalize; here we offer both more objective results (restricted to bloggers) as well as the opportunity for depth, as topics and themes are open to further detailed analysis (Rahmani, Gnoth, and Mather 2017). Furthermore, new data sets are becoming available as tourists keep traveling and writing.…”

“…It has been widely used in studying qualities of experiences, behavior, and individuals’ views of the world across cultures (Hollis and Westbury 2016). Despite its popularity in other fields (Fontaine 2013; Kervyn, Fiske, and Yzerbyt 2013), we found only two studies (Gnoth et al 2000; Rahmani, Gnoth, and Mather 2017) that apply Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum’s (1957) model to tourism research. However, there are numerous other studies that apply this otherwise popular scale in developing survey instruments (Kervyn, Fiske, and Yzerbyt 2013).…”

“…Hence, we seek to apply an alternative or supplementary methodology to surveys and invasive psychophysiological measures, by using Corpus Linguistics (CL) (Rahmani, Gnoth, and Mather 2017) to measure emotional experiences. We rely on Web 2.0 as the main source for providing textual data.…”

The Brand Value Continuum: Countering Co-destruction of Destination Branding in Social Media through Storytelling

“…Hence, storytellers on social media influence each other’s attitudes and beliefs. As users share their stories and reviews communicating their perceptions of a destination, DMOs can track these stories to understand tourists’ feelings about the experiences they offer (Rahmani, Gnoth, and Mather 2017).…”

Exploring User-Generated Content for Improving Destination Knowledge: The Case of Two World Heritage Cities

“…With Web 2.0, tourists or visitors present increasingly documented OTRs, with an online story-telling process that seems to help them improve their experiences. An illustrative case is the study developed by Rahmani, Gnoth, and Mather [47], which uses Corpus Linguistics (in ICT, this technique is called Natural Language Processing or Text Mining, see below) to extract the "hidden" meanings in OTRs and identify their characteristics, issues explored below.…”