Title: Determining the experience of museum visitors by text mining: example of Topkapı Palace museum

Authors: Ozan Catir

Addresses: Tourism and Travel Services, Vocational School of Ulubey, Usak University, Usak, TR 38000, Turkey

Abstract: Visitor studies on the experiences and expectations of visitors are important for museums in terms of management and development. However, few studies have been designed to explore the components of experience for museum visitors. In this research, the experiences of museum visitors were analysed. Between 20 October 2022 and 30 November 2022, 11,633 comments were downloaded from TripAdvisor platform via Webharvy 5.0 program and transferred to excel program. The resulting file was transferred to the Rapidminer 9.3 program and word frequencies and common keywords were determined using this program. Topic modelling of words was done using the Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model. In the study, five themes were determined: convenience and entertainment, cultural entertainment, personal identity, historical memories and escape. Finally, some relevant discussion and recommendations are presented.

Keywords: visitor study; experience expectation; preference for visiting; text mining; Latent Dirichlet allocation model (LDA); Topkapı Palace Museum; topic modelling; online reviews; tourism; tourist experience.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTP.2024.135435

International Journal of Tourism Policy, 2024 Vol.14 No.1, pp.107 - 118

Received: 10 Jan 2023
Accepted: 29 Apr 2023
Published online: 12 Dec 2023 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article