Public Perceptions about Nepalese National Parks: A Global Twitter Discourse Analysis

Values of Mountain Landscapes: Insights About the Blue Mountains National Park, Australia from Twitter

“…Here people from 44 countries talked about the Blue Mountains during the sampling period while globally tweets about parks were sent by accounts from more than 180 countries (Norman, 2020). The size and nature of the discourse varies dramatically among continents, regions, parks and people (Brown et al, 2020; Norman, Bhatt & Pickering, 2021;Mangachena & Pickering, 2021). For the Blue Mountains, lots of the people tweeting about the Park were Australians, and this appears to be common, with nationals often tweeting about parks in their own country (Hamstead et al, 2018;Norman, 2020;Bhatt & Pickering, 2021;Mangachena & Pickering, 2021).…”

“…The size and nature of the discourse varies dramatically among continents, regions, parks and people (Brown et al, 2020; Norman, Bhatt & Pickering, 2021;Mangachena & Pickering, 2021). For the Blue Mountains, lots of the people tweeting about the Park were Australians, and this appears to be common, with nationals often tweeting about parks in their own country (Hamstead et al, 2018;Norman, 2020;Bhatt & Pickering, 2021;Mangachena & Pickering, 2021). Tweets about national parks cover a range of issues including geographical location (such as country, region, nearest city), visitation, landscape features and/or biodiversity within the Park, access and facilities, as Large number of people reading tweets with some accounts with millions of followers.…”

“…7.2). Similar approaches have been used to assess a specific issue (horses) in a specific park (Kosciuszko National Park) during a period of intense public debate (Pickering & Norman, 2020), to compare public discourse among different types of national parks in South Africa (Mangachena & Pickering, 2021) and to assess at a country level the scale and nature of public debate about national parks in Nepal (Bhatt & Pickering, 2021). It is possible to directly use TAGS for Twitter to search for a given park, location or topic relevance by entering specific search term(s), and then monitor it over time to examine changes in responses to specific events, with the resulting metadata about the tweets available to export as csv file(s) for further analysis.…”

“…To quantify the content of the tweets, the text of all the tweets can be pasted into online programs such as 'wordcloud.com' to generate a list of common words, to then, group common terms into categories. For the Blue Mountains tweets words were grouped if they related to tourism/visiting, the location of the Park, features within the Park, activities, management issues, conservation, safety and others, and tweets with such terms/categories using a similar approach to other studies of tweets about Parks (Pickering & Norman, 2020;Bhatt & Pickering, 2021;Mangachena & Pickering, 2021). For the Blue Mountains Park the most common terms related to geographical locations and visiting the Park and individual tweets were coded if they therefore contained terms such as visit or trip, wentworth or falls, Sydney, Katoomba, three or sisters, nsw or new south wales, world heritage, or "aust" for variants on Australia (Table 7.1).…”

“…It can be used to monitor visitation to national parks (Hamstead et al, 2018;Tenkanen et al, 2017) and to assess how people and organisations respond to events in parks and their management (Brown et al, 2020;Fink et al, 2020;Pickering & Norman, 2020). This includes comparing how people feel about parks, including those living close by, as well as those based further away (Pickering & Norman, 2020;Bhatt & Pickering, 2021;Mangachena & Pickering, 2021). Twitter is also used by news organisations, government management agencies, tourism operators and others to inform people about specific parks, with some of these accounts with millions of followers (Halpenny & Blye, 2017;Orellana-Rodriguez & Keane, 2018;Leetaru, 2019;Norman, 2020;Pickering & Norman, 2020).…”