Mining for Tourists in China:
A Digital Ethnography of User-Generated Content about China's National Mine Parks
Date and Time: 2022.5.3(Tue) 17:00-18:30
Link: https://snu-ac-kr.zoom.
Inquiries: ichina@snu.ac.kr
*The seminar will be held in English.
Lecture Outline:
Between 2005 and 2021, the Ministry of Land Resources of the People’s Republic of China operated a program to turn 88 former state-sector coal, oil shale, and mineral mines into national mine parks. By transforming deindustrialised mines into heritage sites, central government and local officials hoped to reroute some of China’s annual domestic tourist arrivals and tourism revenue into communities suffering from the economic recession since the Chinese Communist Party’s decision to marketise its state and collective industries; it entailed combining mining areas’ historical, technical, social, and scientific value with tourist amenities to produce natural and cultural heritage attractions. In this article, I employ a digital ethnography of user-generated content (UGC) from social media to investigate how Chinese tourists experience and make meaning at China’s national mine parks. UGC has become a key source of data about tourism through quantitative “big data” studies that use computer algorithms to “mine” sources such as Trip Advisor, Flickr, and Instagram. This digital ethnography of UGC on the Chinese travel review site Trip.com builds on and extends the research by adopting a qualitative and immersive method to approach visitor comments, ratings, and images about Chinese mine parks as integrated encapsulations of what Chinese tourists experience and find meaningful about these heritage sites.