텍스트 마이닝 기법을 활용한 한국 언론의 동남아 담론 분석

Abstract

This study analyzed newspaper articles about Southeast Asia, produced by 6 Korean daily newspapers from 1990 to 2018, using text mining technique which is one of big data analysis methods. According to the analysis of Southeast Asian discourse produced by Korean media over the past 30 years, articles related to Southeast Asia have mainly focused on international and economic areas. These results show that Southeast Asia has been approached mainly in relation to economic aspects in Korea's media discourse (in the context of international relations in which major powers such as China, America, and Japan are emerging as major actors). Next, the articles in the cultural section also accounted for a relatively high proportion. Among the articles on culture, travel and tourism were predominant throughout the entire period, reflecting the reality that Southeast Asia has become a major destination for Koreans to travel abroad since the liberalization of overseas travel in the late 1980s. Meanwhile, since the 2000s, it has been confirmed that 'Hallyu' and related vocabulary are emerged as a high frequency vocabulary in the cultural section, which is interpreted as reflecting economic interest in Korean Wave rather than culture itself. A remarkable phenomenon in the analysis of the vocabulary constituting the discourse of Southeast Asia is that the number of articles in politics section has been relatively small, as well as centered on inter-Korean relations, not on the political phenomenon of Southeast Asia itself. This is evidenced by the fact that the word 'North Korea' has always appeared at the highest frequency throughout the entire period among the vocabularies used in political section articles. This result shows that in the political section, the Korean media have considered Southeast Asia as a battleground for diplomacy between South and North Korea. Media is a place where diverse discourses are produced, rivaled, disseminated, consumed, and spread, and the discourse formed by the media has a decisive influence on public perception and practice. In that regard, the gap in perception of Southeast Asia between academia and the media is a common task that must be filled as soon as possible.