Recent Trends in LA-Based Research: A Topic Analysis of CELA Abstract Content

Abstract

With more than 120 institutions and more than 300 global members, the annual CELA conference has showcased the most relevant topics related to landscape architecture (LA) research for 100 years. CELA organizes its research by topic into content areas called tracks. Despite a series of overviews of LA-based research trends, systematic examinations of how well the conference tracks align to such topics have never been conducted. This study evaluates tendencies in CELA published abstracts in recent years to determine which topics are most relevant to current LA-based research and assesses how the CELA track system parallels these trends. We gathered CELA abstracts and analyzed them comprehensively and by individual research track. Despite its century-long legacy, thorough data exist only on CELA abstract submissions from 2013–2019, a total of 2,426 abstract entries over a seven-year period. We applied latent Dirichlet allocation models on abstracts to identify the top 20 topics. Trends show that communitybased approaches involving climate change, hydrology, land reuse, and social equity issues are at the core of most recent CELA research while research also continually seeks to embrace new technology and tools. The topics we identified as most relevant to LA research inform recommendations for CELA’s track system; these topics can also be used by other LA-based conference venues to help reshape their organizational structures. The methodology can be replicated and applied to different conference venues.