Exploring the Festival Attendees’ Experiences on Social Media: A Study on the Guangzhou International Light Festival

Abstract

This article explores festival attendees’ experiences on social media. Data on festival attendees’ posts on the Guangzhou International Light Festival were collected from TikTok. The Jieba Chinese word segmentation tool was applied to tokenize the texts and then classify the high-frequency words and phrases into five dimensions of festival experiences. The five dimensions of festival attendees’ experiences are cognitive, novel, affective, physical participation, and social interaction. A combination of the modularity algorithm and Gephi was used to cluster and visualize the festival attendees’ overall experiences and the different experiences in terms of gender and age. The results indicate that, in festival attendees’ overall experience, cognitive experience accounted for the largest proportion, followed by physical participation, and the proportion of social interaction, emotional experience, and novel experience was less. Moreover, the demographic characteristics of gender and age differ in the festival experience.