Tourism-Receiving Countries in Connotative Google Space

Emotion-carrying connotations are regarded as constituents of destination images. The connotative word items symptomatically associated with country names are likely to influence the emotional state and hence arousal level of Web users when browsing through tourism-related pages. The co-occurrence frequencies of connotative nouns and tourism-receiving country names in Web content serve as a basis for portraying the countries’ positions in connotative space. Transforming the raw frequencies into Normalized Google Distances makes them comparable. Automated data retrieval operates for the Web domain defined by “tourism OR tourist OR travel OR trip.” Visualizing the destination countries’ similarity in terms of Web-projected connotative profiles highlights one aspect of competitive threat. It is demonstrated with disjunctive and nondisjunctive hierarchical clustering, network analysis, and Sammon mapping.