IGU REGIONAL CONFERENCE IN KRAKÓW, POLAND, 18th-22nd AUGUST 2014

Abstract

The study investigates and analyzes the representation of on-line content emerging from travel blogs as part of a narrative process. To analyze the tourist image and other relevant characteristics revealed from the text of the travel blogs, text mining techniques are used to analyze the blogs corpus. The city of Bucharest is the case study of this research that helps us to examine the characteristics of over 600 travel blogs before and after the integration into the EU. The aim is to provide insights into the image communicated by tourists through their social narrative experience and to bring into the light the produced image of the chosen destination throughout the two respective periods. The research sharpens our understanding about the path of one former communist capital city and the role of tourism and blogging for city production. In doing so, it will broaden the geography of tourism research and it will offer a bridge between the little explored tourism of the capital cities of Central and Eastern Europe and the tourism of other capital cities.