LDA-Based Topic Mining for Unveiling the Outstanding Universal Value of Solo Keroncong Music as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of UNESCO

Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) is an essential value of culture and nature. It is so extraordinary that it transcends national boundaries and becomes generally crucial for all humanity's current and future generations. A culture with this value needs permanent protection because it is considered a critical heritage for the world community. Solo keroncong music, as one of the local wisdom owned by the Indonesian nation, has yet to be recognized as one of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). It has even become an instrument of Indonesia's soft power diplomacy in several countries, such as Malaysia, England, and the United States. It must be of OUV and meet at least one of ten selection criteria to be included on the World Heritage List. This study explored the OUV of Solo keroncong music using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The primary data were obtained by conducting an FGD with the Indonesian Keroncong Music Artist Community (KAMKI) Surakarta and in-depth interviews with several keroncong figures in Solo. The result showed there are four topics with a coherent score of 0.51. Then, the expert mapped those four topics into three OUVs of Solo keroncong music as temporary findings. Keroncong music is a masterpiece of human creativity, a witness to civilization, and has traditional values. These findings showed that Solo keroncong music is worthy of being proposed as one of the UNESCO ICH.

@article{Witarti2025,
  title     = {LDA-Based Topic Mining for Unveiling the Outstanding Universal Value of Solo Keroncong Music as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of UNESCO},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {16},
  number    = {2},
  year      = {2025},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Denik Iswardani Witarti and Danis Sugiyanto and Atik Ariesta and Pipin Farida Ariyani and Rusdah},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160299},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160299}
}