Abstract Assessing relational values of nature through its cultural and spiritual significance is crucial for effective nature conservation. Folktales offer insights into traditional relationships between people and nature, and text mining is a powerful tool for extracting information from textual datasets. However, there are virtually no studies that apply text mining to folktales to assess relational values of nature. In this study, we used text mining to analyse over 30,000 folktales from the Ryukyu Islands of Japan, a region known for its unique system of nature worship. Our aim was to explore the cultural and spiritual significance of the islands' landscapes. In folktales from two regions, the Miyako and Yaeyama islands, constructed co‐occurrence networks showed strong associations between ‘deity’ and landscape‐related words such as ‘sea’, ‘beach’ and ‘well’, suggesting that these landscape features played an important role as settings for narratives involving deities. In folktales from the Miyako Islands, where water resources are scarce, ‘well’ and ‘deity’ showed particularly strong co‐occurrence and semantic similarity (cosine similarity ≥0.3 using Word2Vec), highlighting that wells have traditionally been regarded as sacred. This study provides humanities‐based support for conserving these landscape features. Our text mining approach is potentially applicable to folktales from other regions, offering a novel method for recognising traditional relational values of nature. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Saito et al. (Tue,) studied this question.