Dr. Jinwon Kim’s summer: 2 publications and 1 award

Dr. Jinwon Kim, Assistant Professor in the Department of Tourism, Hospitality and Event Management has achieved some great accomplishments in past few months: 2 publications and one research grant.  

The Award of $279,796 was granted by the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System (GCOOS) to conduct the two-year project “Assessment of the short- and long-term socioeconomic impacts of Florida’s 2017-2019 Red Tide event”, to be conducted in partnership with the researchers from UF/IFAS (University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences) Drs. Christa Court, Xiang Bi, Angie Lindsey, Stephen Morgan, Andrew Ropicki, and Ricky Telg, as well as Dr. David Yoskowitz from the Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M University. The group will quantify and qualify the short- and long-term impacts of the Karenia brevis in Florida and will develop a framework to guide national-scale efforts aiming to quantify and measure vulnerability and resilience of coastal communities impacted. According with Dr. Court, economist and lead researcher from UF/IFAS, “The outcomes of this project are not only important for the state of Florida but will inform ongoing discussions related to mitigation and prevention of HABs and their associated impacts amongst academics, federal, state and local policymakers, as well as industry stakeholders, recreational users and the general public.” GCOOS is the only National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-certified observing organization focused on the Gulf of Mexico.  

In addition to the grant received, Dr. Kim had two articles published this year. The article titled Tourism clusters and peer-to-peer accommodation, in collaboration with Yong-Jin Alex Lee (Gainesville Community Spatial Lab) and Seongsoo Jang (Cardiff University) is published at the Annals of Tourism Research (Volume 83, July 2020). The study focuses on the importance of tourism clusters and uses geographically weighted regression to understand the performance of Airbnb listings in Florida, finding that areas with higher concentration of accommodation and food services generally lead to superior Airbnb performance, which can help hosts and tourism policymakers to create strategies for maximizing performance. The second article is titled Visualizing theme park visitors’ emotions using social media analytics and geospatial analytics, and is authored in collaboration with Seunghyun Brian Park (St. John’s University), Yong Kyu Lee (York College), and Chihyung Michael Ok (Temple University), published at the Tourism Management (Volume 80, October 2020). The study combines social media analytics (text mining analysis) and geospatial analytics to visualize places where Disneyland visitors express different types of emotion by analyzing 19K+ tweets from 226K+ tweets collected that contained at least one emotion word. The study developed a way to display quadrants of different emotions in specific areas and attractions in the theme park. The study helps visualize spatial patterns to visitors’ emotions, which can guide practitioners to develop routes that will stimulate the most pleasant emotions, and consequently increase satisfaction.  

We are always proud and thankful for the contributions of our researchers to the Eric Friedheim Tourism Institute and the University of Florida. Help us congratulate Dr. Jinwon Kim, and continue following us for more updates on our research and contributions to the academia and tourism industry.