Sensing World Heritage: An Exploratory Study of Twitter as a Tool for Assessing Reputation

摘要

Social media services play an important role in today's society and are increasingly used by the scientific community to understand the human landscape, with regard to local sensitivities and the broadcasting of opinion. Collection of social media feeds has become a new data source for understanding and modelling phenomena. This article explores the possibility of understanding the relationship of people with world heritage using the information collected from Twitter. The information collected from late December 2013 to the end of January 2014, submitted to temporal, spatial and text mining analysis, shows that Twitter messages convey important meaning about local and global sensitivities regarding world heritage. Examples include the buzz regarding the possible delisting by the Australian government of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage; the destruction of the heritage in Syria due to armed conflict, and the petition to include the Leuser Ecosystem in the world heritage list. It concludes that using data from social media services, such as Twitter, could improve our understanding of how people relate to world heritage, in a local and global perspective, and be a valuable tool in world heritage studies and management.