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.