Evaluation on Visual Landscape Perception Under the Support of Digital Footprint: A Case Study of Historic Urban Landscape of the Qinhuai River Area

In view of the ambiguity of visual landscape characteristics, this research points out the implicit characteristics and research difficulties of visual landscape perception. Based on the theory of “tourist gaze”, the research adopts travel photos as a visual representation medium to explore how to build observers’ preference toward the visual perception of tourist landscape. The popularity of digital footprint in the era of big data has made the comment information and geo-tagged photos uploaded to the Internet by travelers an important data source for studying the visual perception of landscape. Based on this, the research: 1) incorporates two types of digital footprints into traditional landscape evaluation framework, innovates the evaluation methods for visual landscape perception from such aspects as the transformation process and correlation mechanism between object image, visual image and mental image and, taking Qinhuai River Scenery Belt within the historic urban area of Nanjing as the research object, codes and identifies the landscape perception elements contained in the text content of digital footprints by NVivo (a qualitative analysis tool), and codes travel photos by RQDA (a qualitative analysis software); 2) builds an evaluation system for visual perception of landscape in Qinhuai River Scenery Belt from the three dimensions of natural value, historical value and socio-economic value by integrating the perspectives of experts and the public; 3) analyzes the application potential of the aforesaid evaluation system from the perspectives of classification definition and control of landscape resources. The research concludes that the analysis of visual landscape features based on the integration of expert and public perspectives and the design thinking based on the evaluation of visual landscape perception are of great significance to the landscape research and image improvement of tourist destinations.