Reconstructing the tourist gaze in heritage landscapes: evidence from online reviews of Jiangnan classical gardens

This study examines how the textual tourist gaze is expressed in online reviews of Jiangnan classical gardens through ABSA-inspired dominant-aspect classification and review-level sentiment analysis of 30,478 reviews from 28 sites. We develop an eight-dimensional Landscape Aesthetic Attribute Taxonomy (LAAT), grounded in classical Chinese garden theory, particularly Yuanye, and Attention Restoration Theory. One fine-tuned MacBERT classifier assigns each review to its dominant LAAT dimension, while a second, independently fine-tuned model identifies overall sentiment polarity. The findings reveal a highly uneven distribution of dominant themes in the review corpus, providing a textual indication of how tourist attention is selectively represented in online reviews, with Atmosphere & Conception accounting for 33.0% of all reviews. Sentiment also varies significantly across dimensions. Core esthetic dimensions, including Architecture & Construction and Rockery & Waterscape, maintain positive-sentiment rates above 88%, whereas Service & Facility records a negative rate of 36.0%. An adapted Importance-Performance Analysis heuristically suggests that Service & Facility may warrant priority attention in future improvement efforts. Hierarchical clustering further grouped the gardens into four clusters based on their dimension-specific sentiment profiles. Theoretically, the study conceptualizes the textual gaze as the selective, evaluative, and culturally mediated act of writing about a landscape and shows how review text can provide an empirical articulation of the tourist gaze. We further conceptualize the textual gaze as the outcome of a five-stage textualization process and organize the LAAT as a two-level hierarchy, enabling analysis at both fine-grained and broader categorical levels.