User Perceptions of Text Mining in Peri-Rural Landscapes and Topic Modeling of Icheon City in the Seoul Metropolitan Region

The purpose of this study is to explore and analyse user perceptions of peri-rural landscapes in the Seoul metropolitan region, using Icheon City as a case study. While the multifunctionality of peri-rural areas—providing ecological, cultural, and socioeconomic benefits—is increasingly recognised, the perceptual and experiential dimensions remain underexplored in South Korea. To address this gap, 10,578 Naver Blog posts were collected and refined, resulting in 8078 valid entries. Methodologically, this study introduces an innovative approach by integrating centrality analysis with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling of user-generated content, supported by a bespoke dictionary of 170 local landscape resources. This combined framework allows simultaneous examination of structural associations and thematic narratives within user perceptions. The results indicate that resources such as Seolbong Urban Park, Seolbong Mountain, and the Cornus Fruit (sansuyu) Villages function as symbolic hubs in the perceptual network, while thematic clusters capture multi-dimensional concerns spanning leisure, ecology, culture, suburbanization, and real estate. Synthesised together, these findings demonstrate that user perceptions construct peri-rural landscapes not as isolated sites, but as spatially cohesive and thematically interconnected systems that mediate between urban and rural domains. Overall, this study contributes to metropolitan planning discourse by highlighting perceptual dimensions alongside functional and ecological dimensions. It shows that users cognitively construct peri-rural landscapes as systems that are both spatially cohesive and thematically interconnected, and that function as spaces that link urban and rural areas. Crucially, this study provides a replicable framework for using user-generated content to inform the planning and management of peri-rural landscapes in metropolitan areas.