CARBONDALE, Ill. — When the 2024 total solar eclipse rolls around on April 8, one Southern Illinois University researcher will be focused on all of the tourists traveling for the event.
Ruopu Li is an associate professor of geography and environmental resources in the School of Earth Systems and Sustainability at SIU.
During the last total solar eclipse in 2017, which reached the point of totality near Carbondale much like this year's eclipse will, Li used a grant to study tourism patterns.
He mined social media data from X, formerly known as Twitter, which included posts, spatial and temporal patterns and attendance at local eclipse-related activities. The team was also able to analyze where the tourists had come from, the places they stopped while traveling to and from the Carbondale area, and the messages they shared about it all on X.
Now this year, Li and his students plan to do similar research. With the two events happening a mere seven years apart, he's hoping to find interesting comparisons in things, such as visitor travel patterns.
Rural and small communities often have very little detailed data on tourist patterns and behaviors. Having a huge event like a solar eclipse gives researchers a rare opportunity.
"It makes for a big increase in visitors to the area, and that gives us a special opportunity to look at how people move around and how we can improve services for them,” Li said in a press release. “Social media is a great, free way to get data for this kind of study.”
What they found
Li analyzed more than 500 geotagged tweets from tourists within the study area. They found that messages stayed low in numbers until the day directly preceding the eclipse. Tweeting peaked on the day of the event and then quickly diminished.
“This pattern suggests that most tourists visited the region within a narrow, three-day window centered on the event,” Li said. “On most days, evenings witnessed the highest volumes of tweets, suggesting active evening gatherings among those spectators.”
The vast majority of the tweets had positive or neutral sentiments about the experience, with about 9% expressing highly positive sentiments. One tweet had a picture from a tourist with the message: “This place is pretty awesome. Taken a couple of minutes before things went dark @ Blue Sky Vineyards.”
90% of the tweets categorized by the researchers were neutral or slightly positive, with just two 'negative' tweets commenting on the high August heat and traffic problems.
The team also found seven "cluster" areas for eclipse-watchers:
- Blue Sky Vineyard
- Walker's Bluff Vineyard
- downtown Carbondale
- SIU's campus
- Rainmaker Art Studio in downtown Makanda
- the city of Herrin
- the village of Goreville
Tourists also frequented restaurants in Marion and the University Mall in Carbondale.
Li and his team also found a majority of the tourists in Southern Illinois had traveled from the Chicago area. Large portions also came from Nashville and St. Louis, indicating future advertising campaigns should focus on key cities to attract tourists.
“We found some interesting facts about those tourists, such as where they came from and when they visited various places in the region,” Li said. “Much of what we found could be used to inform the preparation for this year’s eclipse.”
Li joined The Current on News 8 to discuss the specific comparisons he'll be looking for once he has the 2024 data set as well. You can find the full interview in the above video.
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