Analysis on a Social Phenomenon of Senior Dance based on News Articles

Abstract

This study aims to comprehend social phenomenon of senior dance. For this study, the BIGkinds News Big Data Analysis Service of the Korea Press Foundation was used. Nearly 30,000,000 news articles, written by 54 press companies, including daily newspapers, local daily newspapers and broadcasting companies from January 2000 to December 2019 were collected. To filter unnecessary contents(words) from the collected data, a search algorithm extracting noun equivalents through morphological analysis was employed. After that, the Structured Support Vector Machine(SVM) was applied to noun equivalents extracted afterwards for analysis. The study results are as follows. First, there were a total of 29,146 news big data regarding senior dance. Among them, the region topic occupied the largest number of news articles at 17,808(43.6%), and it was followed by the culture topic at 13,693(33.5%). In relation to the press types, local daily newspapers wrote the largest number of news articles at 21,521(73.8%). Second, starting 2008, there was a rapid increase in senior dance-related keywords, but as of 2012, they decreased. Third, when analyzing the correlation among the named entities(people, places, institutions and keywords) extracted from 100 news articles with the highest accuracy of senior dance keywords, places were most frequently found in 18 news articles, and programs and attendees had the highest correlation with senior dance-related keywords. In conclusion, these results imply that although there has been a big change depending on social interests, a considerable amount of senior dance-related data have been produced in Korean society. This study has significance by analyzing a macroscopic social phenomenon of senior dance using news data. Researching social perceptions of the elderly, activities and behaviors based on these results will help in finding ways of increasing seniors’ participation in dance and understanding their needs.