Speakers
Description
Understanding public perceptions of historic districts demonstrates a pivotal role in both heritage conservation and sustainable urban development. While traditional surveys have long been the standard tool for gathering public opinion, social media commentary has emerged as an increasingly valuable data source, offering deeper insights across broader temporal spans and proven effective by many studies. However, current research faces several notable limitations: the tendency to focus on isolated aspects such as visitor experiences or aesthetic preferences rather than holistic public concerns; the prevalence of single-site, snapshot studies that fail to capture evolutionary patterns across different historic districts; and analytical methods that often decompose social media narratives into discrete units, losing the rich contextual meaning embedded in complete discussions. The recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) presents a promising methodological breakthrough through their capacity for sophisticated natural language understanding and contextual analysis.
To address these challenges, this study introduces an analytical framework that combines Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and LLM to systematically analyze public perspectives on the historic districts. The framework demonstrates robust performance, achieving over 75% accuracy in viewpoint classification. Applying this methodology, we analyzed an extensive dataset of over 190,000 social media comments spanning 46 Chinese historic and cultural districts from 2009 to 2023. Through LDA, we identified eight primary thematic categories in public discourse: built environment, management and services, human behaviors, environmental atmosphere, commercial experience, heritage information, tour information, and district identity. These primary categories were further refined into 16 distinct subcategories to enable more granular analysis.
The thematic distribution derived from the summarization of LLMs and statistical analysis across districts reflects their distinctive characteristics. Noteworthy examples include districts where commercial themes are frequently mentioned in public commentary, such as Furong Street in Jinan, Nanluoguxiang in Beijing, and Ciqikou Ancient Town in Chongqing—all widely documented in literature as archetypal cases of commercialization in historic areas. Additionally, the thematic analysis illuminates public preferences regarding specific district features. Particularly striking is the heightened focus on historic architecture in districts built during the Late Qing to Republican period, especially those featuring well-preserved European-style districts, such as Beijing's Dongjiaominxiang and Tianjin's Wudadao. These districts stand out for their distinct architectural styles compared to the surrounding urban fabric, making them more likely to attract attention and discussion.
Analysis of topic evolution over the study period reveals three significant trends in public perception. Firstly, topics concerning historic buildings, heritage information, and cultural atmosphere have garnered increasing attention. This shift suggests that, following years of preservation efforts and educational initiatives, the public has developed a deeper interest in the cultural significance of these districts. This interest now extends beyond the tangible architectural elements to embrace the intangible cultural heritage, including local narratives, traditions, and historical significance.
Secondly, a particularly striking trend is the dramatic surge in location-based social sharing since 2017, with only a modest decline through the pandemic period. This phenomenon aligns with the rise of image-sharing platforms, where the desire to capture and share visually compelling images of historic districts has become a primary visitor motivation. extending even to less touristic areas.
Thirdly, the analysis also points to a noticeable decline in public discussions surrounding the living atmosphere and local memory. This shift can be attributed to the commercialization of historic districts, where urban renewal and architectural modifications have often overshadowed the preservation of authentic residential character. While these transformations have generally yielded positive economic outcomes, it has also diminished the traditional living environment that once defined these neighborhoods. This trend highlights the challenge of balancing the commercial development with the protection of the area’s authentic character.
References
Zhang, S. and Feick, R., 2016. Understanding Public Opinions from Geosocial Media. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 5 (6), 74.
Zhang, Y., Yan, S., Liu, J., and Xu, P., 2023. Popularity influence mechanism of creative industry parks: A semantic analysis based on social media data. Sustainable Cities and Society, 90, 104384.
| Keywords | public perceptions; historic districts; large language model; social media |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
