Popularity influence mechanism of creative industry parks: A semantic analysis based on social media data

•A methodology of calculation and explanation to explore the popular mechanism of cultural venues.•fsQCA analysis of conditions making cultural and creative industry parks popular.•Sematic analysis of Popularity influential factors of cultural and creative industry parks.•Coordination, cultural facilities and parking lot are found as critical elements. Why some places are popular but others are not? Many studies have captured the drivers of a place's popularity, but few have explained how they work. The contribution of this study is that it proposes a methodology composed of “calculation” and “explanation” so as to explore the key factors and mechanisms that influence cultural venues to become popular places. 41 cultural and creative industry parks in Beijing were chosen and points-of-interest (POIs) and Dazhong Dianping (DZDP) social media data was used in this study. Park popularity was judged by the DZDP star rating and the average number of comments per year (ANCPY). The “calculation” of the main influence factors was based on fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), and the “explanation” of their rules was based on Word2vec. It is found that “coordination between old and new”, “density of cultural, scientific and educational facilities”, “building height diversity”, “parking lot density”, “number of bus stops” and the “number of universities and scientific research institutions” influence park popularity by affecting the aesthetics of framing scenes, the cultural functions, parking system, and accessibility. The conclusions can be referred to by park planners and operators to improve cultural ecosystem service and passenger flow volume.