Social media and European cultural routes: Instagram networks on the Via Francigena

Abstract

In the last few years, European Cultural Routes have become important tourist destinations. What makes this kind of tourism interesting is both the complexity of values and significances that motivate it and the variety of social actors (walkers, inhabitants, institutions, commercial actors, etc.) that are involved. Empirical studies on this phenomenon are still limited because they are really time-consuming and resource-demanding. Yet, social media data seem to provide new perspectives on this field by generating digital traces of the tourists' behavior. This paper aims at exploring how social media data can be employed in order to study tourism on European Cultural Routes. We will consider the case study of the platform Instagram on the route "Via Francigena".