Using Instagram data for tourism promotion of fishery villages

Recently, fishery villages, which have been threatened with decline due to the aging society and depopulation, have begun to consider “blue tourism” as a means of revitalization, taking advantage of the rich marine products, traditions and culture unique to the sea-facing areas. However, it is hard to formulate tourism strategies by systemizing local resources which are diverse and have not originally been recognized as tourism resources. Therefore, this study aims to provide information that contributes to tourism promotion strategies by structuring people’s images of fishery villages utilizing big data accumulated on Instagram. After converting the obtained data (images, texts and hashtags) into one structured dataset by hashing, the integrated patterns of the posts related to fishery villages were clarified and visualized by machine learning. The result revealed the diversity of the data and the combination of various types of data can be classified into several major patterns (e.g., a combination of scenery in fishery villages with text to complement to the lifestyle in the villages). The results of this study indicate the potential for a variety of tourism strategies in fishery villages and suggest the importance of considering a combination of the three types of data when developing tourism strategies.