¹ Image generated with ChatGPT’s DALL-E.

Spring has arrived in Korea, renowned for its vibrant festivals. This post serves as a guide for those seeking detailed information on the geolocations, dates, and more regarding virtually all Korean festivals.

The data’s source is Korean Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sports as of March 20, 2024.

I created this map using Google Map’s API and the googleway (Cooley 2022) package.

Number of Festivals per Month

Apparently the most festivals are in October, September, and May unsurprisingly!

Number of Festivals per Province

Jeju and Gangwon are leading in terms of the number of festivals organized, while Sejong and Daejon are busy with research and government affairs 😅 (they are also smaller in population compared to other polities!).

What Festivals? Text Analysis

This analysis reveals that most festivals revolve around culture, flowers (particularly cherry blossoms!), music, and the arts.

A cautionary note: The data was only available in Korean. I translated the festival names using the googletranslate function in Google Sheets. Therefore, the English names may not be entirely accurate. The challenge with Korean names is that they often lack spaces between words, complicating the analysis of individual terms.

Download the Data

You can download the data from my kdata package.

References

Cooley, David. 2022. “Googleway: Accesses Google Maps APIs to Retrieve Data and Plot Maps.” https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=googleway.