Mapping online viewers’ social and non-social emotions using the lens of watching UNESCO cultural heritage sites’ travel vlogs

Emotions are highly influential variables in tourism. While emotions have gained momentum and have been regularly studied by tourism scholars in various aspects of tourism, social and non-social emotions remain underexplored, especially in heritage tourism. Considering the power of heritage YouTube vlogs in eliciting emotions that are essential in creating sustainability for heritage sites, this qualitative sentiment analysis investigation was undertaken to surface the social and non-social emotions present in the comments posted on select YouTube heritage vlogs. Accordingly, sixty-four (n = 64) heritage vlogs featuring the Historic City of Vigan, Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, and Baroque Churches of the Philippines were utilized. Using Data Miner, three thousand eighty-nine (n = 3,089) significant YouTube comments were extracted, filtered, and underwent Phronetic Iterative Data Analysis (Tracy, 2013, Qualitative research methods: Collecting evidence, crafting analysis, communicating impact, 2nd ed., John Wiley & Sons). Consequently, a protractor model dubbed as Vlogs as a protractor of audience social and non-social emotions with its three angles of reminiscence, intrigue, and desire emerged where various time perspectives and accompanying groups of social and non-social emotions generated by heritage vlogs situate themselves. Theoretically, this study expands the applicability of social and non-social emotions in heritage research while practically providing heritage tourism practitioners with information on utilizing social media to understand and promote heritage sites to online viewers.