Analysis of Research Trends of NRF’s Humanities City Support Project

Abstract

(Purpose) Through the analysis of unstructured big data, this study analyzes the research trends in the field of the Humanities Popularization Project of the Korea Research Foundation over the past 10 years to examine whether the purpose of the Humanities City Support Project is being effectively promoted and to explore the way forward. (Design/methodology/approach) After collecting data related to keywords, research goals, expected effects, and research summaries of the research project, we connected the data to the data held by Textom, a big data analysis solution program, to perform data purification and preprocessing. The frequency and matrix files generated by Textom were connected to the UciNet program to perform semantic linkage network and centrality analysis. CONCOR analysis, a technique that clusters keywords in structural positions by analyzing the relationship between co-occurring keywords, was performed. (Findings) The results of the TF-IDF analysis were presented in the order of 'healing', 'humanities', 'culture', 'happiness', 'city', 'community', 'region', 'citizen', 'art', and 'resident'. The results of the connection centrality analysis show that 'humanities' and 'humanities' 'culture', 'city', 'region', 'citizen', 'course', 'business', 'history', 'experience', 'society', and 'program' are highly active, which is similar to the results of the frequency and TF-IDF analysis. In addition, the results of the dominance centrality analysis are similar to the results of the connection centrality analysis. The CONCOR analysis shows that the first group is highly related to keywords related to the understanding of humanities such as 'humanities', 'humanities', 'culture', 'humanities-based', 'tradition', and 'human'. The second group shows high keyword relevance for humanities subjects such as "city," "region," "citizen," "community," "communication," "participation," "residents," and "youth. The third group includes humanities programs such as "history," "courses," "programs," "topics," "education," "composition," "literature," "art," and "content," and the fourth group includes humanities directions such as "life," "values," "healing," "spirit," "meaning," "proliferation," "stagnation," "future," "opportunity," and "contribution. (Research implications or Originality) Based on these findings, we believe that the way forward is to develop humanities programs that directly involve local community members in order to meet the goals of the HRF's Humanities Popularization Project. To this end, we summarize our policy suggestions as follows. First, budgetary support is needed to increase the value of the humanities through the Humanities City Support Project and to share and spread humanities programs with the public. Second, the Humanities City Support Project should be renamed the 'Humanities and Arts City Support Project' by including the arts in its scope, and should be made more public-friendly by adding experiences and performances to humanities-centered lectures. Third, as the times are changing rapidly and the channels for listening to theoretical humanities lectures through online media are diversifying and popularizing, it is necessary to specialize in programs that can generate experience and interest and activate community resources instead of focusing on lectures. If the project so far has been mainly a case of mobilizing audiences artificially, we should avoid this and ask for a way to actively engage basic local governments in lifelong education.