A Cultural Tourism Strategy: Enriching Culture and Building Tourism in Buffalo Niagara

Their continued dedication to the region\u27s cultural, arts and heritage organizations and the development of cultural tourism has been, and will continue to be, essential to attaining the vision of “A Cultural Tourism Strategy”. The cultural tourism mission is to strengthen cultural, artistic and heritage organizations; expand individual opportunities for creativity and interpretation; help our regional economy grow; enhance the quality of life in our communities; advance the image and identity of the region; and build the region\u27s reputation as a world-class tourism destination. These benefits reinforce one another and can be achieved together

The polaroid image as photo-object

This article is part of a larger project on the cultural history of Polaroid photography and draws on research done at the Polaroid Corporate archive at Harvard and at the Polaroid company itself. It identifies two cultural practices engendered by Polaroid photography, which, at the point of its extinction, has briefly flared into visibility again. It argues that these practices are mistaken as novel but are in fact rediscoveries of practices that stretch back as many as five decades. The first section identifies Polaroid image-making as a photographic equivalent of what Tom Gunning calls the ‘cinema of attractions’. That is, the emphasis in its use is on the display of photographic technologies rather than the resultant image. Equally, the common practice, in both fine art and vernacular circles, of making composite pictures with Polaroid prints, draws attention from image content and redirects it to the photo as object

What Makes Theatrical Performances Successful in China's Tourism Industry?

This study aims to explore the factors affecting the success of a popular tourist product, namely, theatrical performance, within the context of China's tourism industry and develop a model based on previously successful productions. Using qualitative software, 22 Chinese-language articles on theatrical performances are analyzed to generate a list of success factors, classified as internal and external. The internal factors are storyline and performing, market positioning and marketing strategy, investment and financial support, operation and management, performing team, outdoor venue, indoor/outdoor stage supporting facilities, continuous improvement, and production team. The external factors are collaboration between cultural industries and local tourism, government support, privatization, and social and cultural effect. This study also provides suggestions for the future development of theatrical performances in China

Learning From the Historical Culture of American People for the Current Society

We learned more about the contribution of cultural history towards the current society for the American people. In the most general sense, historical culture is a holistic meta-historical concept that opens the investigation of how people deal with the past. The term “historical” refers to past events, including thoughts and ideas. The term “culture” comprises shared attitudes, values, and perceptions of a group of people. Cultural history is not simply the study of high culture or alternatively of peoples' past rituals. It is best characterized as an approach which considers the domain of representation and the struggle over meaning as the most fruitful areas for the pursuit of historical understanding. history is the aggregate of past events while culture is the arts, customs, and habits that characterize a particular society or nation. Cultural history brings to life a past time and place. In this search, cultural historians study beliefs and ideas, much as intellectual historians do. These are reflected in the products of deliberately artistic culture, but also include the objects and experiences of everyday life, such as clothing or cuisine

Tourist attractions as a moderating element in explanatory models for loyalty development

Many studies have analysed the impact of destination image on tourist satisfaction and loyalty, including different mediating variables, both affective and cognitive. This article will attempt to determine whether the representative model of visitors' future behaviour (satisfaction and loyalty) – viewed in terms of destination image, quality, value, disconfirmation, and emotions – follows a common, universal pattern or whether that behaviour actually differs when the model is applied to destinations offering different attractions.The paper below analyses disparate emotional behaviour in relation to destinations mentioned in the literature, when value does not play a mediating role between perception of quality and satisfaction with coastal destinations. This study concludes that there is a common pattern for purely urban cultural destinations while a different pattern exists for urban cultural destinations that include beaches among their attractions.Múltiples estudios han analizado el impacto de la imagen de los destinos en la satisfacción y lealtad de los turistas, incluyendo diversas variables mediadoras tanto afectivas como cognitivas. Este artículo intentará determinar si el modelo de comportamiento futuro del visitante (satisfacción y lealtad), analizado en términos de imagen del destino, calidad, valor, disconfirmación y emociones, sigue un modelo común y universal, o si por el contrario difiere entre destinos que ofrecen diferente tipo de atracciones al visitante.El trabajo contrasta la existencia de un comportamiento dispar de las emociones en relación con lo expuesto en la literatura, al tiempo que se señala que el valor no juega un rol mediador entre la calidad y la satisfacción para los destinos costeros. Como conclusión se extrae que hay un modelo de comportamiento común entre destinos puramente urbanos, mientras que existe otro diferente para destinos culturales urbanos que cuentan con playa entre sus atractivos turísticos

'Don't box me in': Blurred lines in 'Waking Life' and 'A Scanner Darkly'

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.This article seeks to evaluate the visual style of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, predominantly through an analysis of the films’ aesthetics. The use of Rotoshop as an expressive means to illustrate character and theme, where identity becomes sketched and multi-faceted rather than fixed or stable is explored here. Yet this aesthetic play with borders has a greater resonance than simply a means by which to delineate thematic preoccupations with troubled identity. While such representations are indeed key to these two films, the darkly outlined contours of character borders, which move and slide incessantly, also comment on the blurred divide between live action and animation. Central to the argument is the use of the animated line in understanding these two films; the line provides impetus for exploring several issues raised by the films and the use of Rotoshop. This article explores the following key ideas: the animated line and aesthetic analysis; Rotoshop technology; the representation of fragmentary identity; and the relationship between photo-real cinema and animation, with a particular focus on narrative and spectacle. The author addresses Rotoshop within the context of technology and spectacle; taking industry practices into account allows for an appreciation of how a technological innovation such as Rotoshop can change the shape of live-action cinema

Eisenstein, Part 1: 'A Fly in the Fly-Bottle' – Montage to 1930

Few artists have tried harder than Sergei Eisenstein to understand what they were doing, how and why, as they fashioned early on the works that made them famous, and no one among them has ever affirmed later on – with such clarity and conviction – how and why they had at the time misconceived what they were doing, and what lessons they had learned about their art from having done so. Though some filmmakers understood afterwards what Eisenstein had achieved by rethinking what he had done, few commentators, unable to sense hands-on its impetus or consequences, have proven capable of acknowledging it. Within this essay (Part I) I shall unpack what Eisenstein said early on of the mistake that he was making – before recognising it as such. I shall then in a second essay (Part II) reconstrue it definitively as he did later on – after the recognition

Extracting human emotions at different places based on facial expressions and spatial clustering analysis

The emergence of big data enables us to evaluate the various human emotions at places from a statistic perspective by applying affective computing. In this study, a novel framework for extracting human emotions from large-scale georeferenced photos at different places is proposed. After the construction of places based on spatial clustering of user generated footprints collected in social media websites, online cognitive services are utilized to extract human emotions from facial expressions using the state-of-the-art computer vision techniques. And two happiness metrics are defined for measuring the human emotions at different places. To validate the feasibility of the framework, we take 80 tourist attractions around the world as an example and a happiness ranking list of places is generated based on human emotions calculated over 2 million faces detected out from over 6 million photos. Different kinds of geographical contexts are taken into consideration to find out the relationship between human emotions and environmental factors. Results show that much of the emotional variation at different places can be explained by a few factors such as openness. The research may offer insights on integrating human emotions to enrich the understanding of sense of place in geography and in place-based GIS.Comment: 40 pages; 9 figure

From Nascar to Cirque du Soleil: Lessons in Audience Development

Examines marketing trends and principles in entertainment and performance. Case studies include nonprofit arts organizations, mega-concert promoters, for-profit entertainment conglomerates, sports promoters and religious organizations