An inquiry on the potential of computational literary techniques towards successful destination branding and literary tourism

Sentiments and emotions are created for cities in literary texts; certain assets of cities are emphasized consistently as well. That’s why, literary texts have the potential to create a desire to visit the city for the readers. Computational literary techniques offer opportunities for diagnosing sentimental, emotional and topic-based content in literary texts which can be used to enhance insight development for successful destination marketing. ‘A Memento for Istanbul’ was chosen as the case of this study as this novel has rich spatial and temporal content about the city. Computational sentiment analysis, emotional analysis and topic modelling were utilized to analyse this novel from a destination marketing perspective. Sentiment and emotional analyses demonstrated that information about present-day Istanbul, as well as both the distant and modern history of the city, was delivered with different positivity levels and with different emotional patterns, which creates insights for message strategies for destination branding. The results of the topic modelling revealed that computational literacy techniques can be used to reveal specific assets of the city such as iconic buildings or specific experiences that one should have in specific parts of the city. This information can shed light on strategies with high potential for successful branding.