Analysing user needs for Dunhuang cultural heritage information on social media

Abstract

"Digital Dunhuang" concept has been proposed since the 80s of last century, aimed at the use of digital technology to achieve the permanent preservation of Dunhuang Grottoes. The study of user needs can promote the digital work of Dunhuang Grottoes, speed up the construction of digital asset management system, library resource operation and permanent data protection system of Dunhuang, and make due contributions to heritage protection, academic research, education promotion and artistic development. With the Internet gradually becomes the mainstream of modern life, ways of life and communication are undergoing profound changes. The rapid development of social media is an important manifestation of this process. The general public often talk about Dunhuang on social media. Therefore, analysis on social media data can help us explore public information needs on Dunhuang culture world widely, complementing the traditional research methods like questionnaire surveys and interviews in the range of research objects. This dissertation conducts a comparative analysis on domestic and foreign users’ information needs of Dunhuang cultural heritage by text mining and social network analysis methods to compare the user information needs of Dunhuang cultura l heritage both at home and abroad, reveal the difference of Dunhuang cultura l information demand between Chinese and western at social media public level, describe and grasp the hotspot information needs of Chinese and English language users, as well as the feasible trend of Dunhuang cultural heritage digita l development, with a view to provide some suggestions and reference value to future research. By using word frequency analysis, constructing the method of visualizing co-word network, sentiment analysis and retweet network visualization, this paper has concluded an effective way to deeply understand and carry forward the dunhuang cultural heritage. In the new media context, including the digita l visualization, keeping optimize the visual images at the same time, this paper suggests that Digital Dunhuang should also fully excavate other non-materia l, intangible cultural heritage resources to meet user needs.