Since the legislation of 『Landscape Act』in 2007, the world of the landscape in South Korea has been allowed to plan and apply the landscape that incorporates the natural environment, historical culture, and living space based on the legal foundati...
Since the legislation of 『Landscape Act』in 2007, the world of the landscape in South Korea has been allowed to plan and apply the landscape that incorporates the natural environment, historical culture, and living space based on the legal foundation. From this time on, explicit management on landscape began. Nevertheless, because 『Landscape Act』mainly concerns the management of urban area landscape, the assessment and management of natural landscape are still relatively meager compared to that of the urban area landscape. In addition, the research on landscape resources has been conducted on the level of a status survey or selected and evaluated based on the subjective judgment of experts. Moreover, the scope of the previous studies on landscape resources has been limited to surveying and seeking management strategies only pertaining to visible resources although landscape comprises many layers including the viewed object, the viewing entity, and experience activities. Consequently, the experiential landscape perceived by people has rarely been studied in comparison.
In this light, the present study conducted a landscape study using social media as a way of remedying the limitation of previous studies. This study addresses the need for multilateral landscape research by combining the analysis of visual landscape images with analysis of text about the image as well as the user’s behavior. In addition, this study recognized that systematic landscape planning and sustainable landscape management requires an analysis of the landscape from the consumer’s perspective and their perception. One characteristic of social media is sharing with others one’s emotion from certain experience or one’s subjective view of objects or phenomenon. Based on this characteristic, the present study aimed to analyze social media to discover how people behave and what they experience and enjoy around a scenic landscape.
This study selected Taean Coast National Park as the research target; elicited typical landscape points of Taean Coast National Park that the public recognizes on Instagram. Then this study elicited the landscape resources and analyzed the characteristics of Taean Coast National Park manifested in social media by classifying the landscape types in Taean Coast National Park based on the analysis of text description of the uploaded images. Based on this, the present study derived four implications.
First, through the literature review of previous studies on the coastal landscape, this study organized the types and components of the coastal landscape, and defined the concept of the coastal landscape that this study aims to cover. Although the concept and scope of the coastal landscape were mentioned in many studies, this study has re-established the concept of the coastal landscape because of the discrepancy in concepts between the studies.
Second, through examining the previous studies on the landscape in terms of the concept and significance of social media, this study addressed the need for analysis of social media in the field of landscape study. Previous landscape studies have used a questionnaire survey method to understand the visitor’s perception. However, it is difficult to collect visitor’s unsolicited opinions because a questionnaire survey is limited in that the response of the survey participant is induced according to the survey items that were designed in advance. By contrast, social media encourage people to participate in them voluntarily; thus, it is advantageous because unsolicited opinions and perception on landscape can be examined without adding or subtracting any content.
Third, this study analyzed the landscape resources and characteristic of landscape perceived by visitors in a certain area as shown in social media. Through text analysis of the relevant posts on Instagram, this study examined the overall perception of visitors to Taean Coast National Park. Based on this, primary attractions of Taean Coast National Park are selected, and representative landscape points were extracted. In addition, by analyzing the comment and hashtags posted along with the photos of the representative landscape, this study extracted keywords and organized the main landscape, activities, preferred factors so as to investigate what the visitors experience in the space and what resources and element they value. This study discovered that Taean Coast National Park has six areas that are perceived to be primary attractions by visitors. A total of 31 landscape points that belong to these areas have been extracted. Subsequently, this study analyzed the visitors’ description and opinions about these 31 landscape points and derived the perception of landscape in Taean Coast National Park.
Fourth, this study analyzed the visitor’s perception of the landscape and their main activities; then established the criteria of landscape type classification based on people’s activities and categorized the CP (Consensus Photograph) landscape. Accordingly, with regard to 31 landscape points previously derived, the landscape types were divided into landscape view, space image, landmark, and experience. By analyzing six representative landscape types, this study investigated how the visitors enjoy the landscape of Taean Coast National Park in terms of activities.
To sum up, the present study remedied the limitation of previous landscape studies and recognized the need for research method of studying landscape resources that reflect the regional characteristics. Under the premise that multilateral analysis on the landscape perceived by the public is essential for establishing a systematic landscape planning and sustainable landscape management strategy, this study extracted the landscape resources of Taean Coast National Park manifested in the social media, which is operated by voluntary participation, and conducted an analysis of landscape features.
The present study was conducted to investigate the public’s perception of landscape, targeting the six main spaces. With regard to this, future studies can investigate the entire Taean Coast National Park by performing an additional research by trail section that runs through Taean Coast National Park. This has significance to be used as baseline data for landscape planning and management for Taean Coast National Park. Furthermore, by applying the research method used in the present study to a study targeting many areas, it is expected that this study will contribute to establishing the experience-based landscape management plan as a baseline study.