BERTopic Modeling of Thematic Structure and Evolution in Intangible Cultural Heritage Research (2016–2025)

Abstract

Intangible cultural heritage incorporates the living practices, expressions, and knowledge systems recognized by communities worldwide. Over the past decade, the increase in ICH research across diverse disciplines has made it difficult to conduct literature analysis using traditional manual reviews. This study addresses this issue by systematically mapping the thematic structure of the English-language, Scopus-indexed ICH research literature. We conducted a BERTopic-based topic modeling analysis of 15,944 English-language Scopus publications (2016–2025). The method derives topics from contextual sentence embeddings instead of word co-occurrence patterns, enabling documents with similar conceptual content but limited shared vocabulary to be grouped within the same topic. The analysis identified 28 distinct main topics (Coherence = 0.4848; Topic Diversity = 0.7464) clustered into distinct research domains. The findings show a modification in the composition of the published literature: the foundational themes (rituals, traditional craft) remain robust, but there is a pronounced increase in technological mediation (virtual and augmented reality), sustainable spatial management (traditional villages), and legal/economic frameworks (intellectual property rights, cultural tourism). This mapping explores the interdisciplinary integration of ICH in the context of recent societal transformation.