ScholarWorks@중앙대학교

초록

This study aims to investigate the major topics and the temporal changes in topic prevalence of the environmental sociology research field in Korea. Focusing on the journal ECO (2001~2025), this study analyzes author-provided keywords across 328 articles using computer-assisted text analysis. After we review previous works on the topic landscape of environmental sociology as a conceptual background, we apply topic modeling to identify core topics and to examine the temporal changes of their prevalences. In preprocessing, individual lexical items are treated as the basic unit of analysis. Synonymous terms, spacing variants, and minor orthographic differences that refer to the same concept are standardized to avoid distorting the results. Given that the corpus of this study consists of short keyword strings, we adopt the Biterm Topic Model (BTM), which infers latent themes from corpus-wide co-occurring word pairs and is appropriate for short texts. We present the descriptive statistics of ECO corpus metadata, the result of frequency analyses, seed-word–based word clouds, and a log-ratio scatter plot that visualizes the relative frequency of vocabularies between the earlier and latter periods. We also report topic modeling outputs, which include lists of key terms per topic, topic prevalence, and temporal trajectories of topic prevalence. Empirically, we found that in the later period, climate, energy, risk, justice, governance, and the commons emerged as increasingly prominent concerns. At the same time, environmental disaster frames, institutional dimensions, and civic environmental movements—distinctive features of the Korean context—remained central to the field’s intellectual structure. These patterns reflect a domestically mediated agenda shaped by specific environmental issues, disasters, institutions, and social movements. Overall, the findings of this paper exhibit the dual character of Korean environmental sociology: it participates in global topic shifts while maintaining a topic landscape grounded in Korean experiences, thereby combining universality with local particularity.

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