Development of Context-Aware Recommenders of Sequences of Touristic Activities

En els últims anys, els sistemes de recomanació s'han fet omnipresents a la xarxa. Molts serveis web, inclosa la transmissió de pel·lícules, la cerca web i el comerç electrònic, utilitzen sistemes de recomanació per facilitar la presa de decisions. El turisme és una indústria molt representada a la xarxa. Hi ha diversos serveis web (e.g. TripAdvisor, Yelp) que es beneficien de la integració de sistemes recomanadors per ajudar els turistes a explorar destinacions turístiques. Això ha augmentat la investigació centrada en la millora dels recomanadors turístics per resoldre els principals problemes als quals s'enfronten. Aquesta tesi proposa nous algorismes per a sistemes recomanadors turístics que aprenen les preferències dels turistes a partir dels seus missatges a les xarxes socials per suggerir una seqüència d'activitats turístiques que s'ajustin a diversos contextes i incloguin activitats afins. Per aconseguir-ho, proposem mètodes per identificar els turistes a partir de les seves publicacions a Twitter, identificant les activitats experimentades en aquestes publicacions i perfilant turistes similars en funció dels seus interessos, informació contextual i períodes d'activitat. Aleshores, els perfils d'usuari es combinen amb un algorisme de mineria de regles d'associació per capturar relacions implícites entre els punts d'interès de cada perfil. Finalment, es fa un rànquing de regles i un procés de selecció d'un conjunt d'activitats recomanables. Es va avaluar la precisió de les recomanacions i l'efecte del perfil d'usuari. A més, ordenem el conjunt d'activitats mitjançant un algorisme multi-objectiu per enriquir l'experiència turística. També realitzem una segona fase d'anàlisi dels fluxos turístics a les destinacions que és beneficiós per a les organitzacions de gestió de destinacions, que volen entendre la mobilitat turística. En general, els mètodes i algorismes proposats en aquesta tesi es mostren útils en diversos aspectes dels sistemes de recomanació turística.En los últimos años, los sistemas de recomendación se han vuelto omnipresentes en la web. Muchos servicios web, incluida la transmisión de películas, la búsqueda en la web y el comercio electrónico, utilizan sistemas de recomendación para ayudar a la toma de decisiones. El turismo es una industria altament representada en la web. Hay varios servicios web (e.g. TripAdvisor, Yelp) que se benefician de la inclusión de sistemas recomendadores para ayudar a los turistas a explorar destinos turísticos. Esto ha aumentado la investigación centrada en mejorar los recomendadores turísticos y resolver los principales problemas a los que se enfrentan. Esta tesis propone nuevos algoritmos para sistemas recomendadores turísticos que aprenden las preferencias de los turistas a partir de sus mensajes en redes sociales para sugerir una secuencia de actividades turísticas que se alinean con diversos contextos e incluyen actividades afines. Para lograr esto, proponemos métodos para identificar a los turistas a partir de sus publicaciones en Twitter, identificar las actividades experimentadas en estas publicaciones y perfilar turistas similares en función de sus intereses, contexto información y periodos de actividad. Luego, los perfiles de usuario se combinan con un algoritmo de minería de reglas de asociación para capturar relaciones entre los puntos de interés que aparecen en cada perfil. Finalmente, un proceso de clasificación de reglas y selección de actividades produce un conjunto de actividades recomendables. Se evaluó la precisión de las recomendaciones y el efecto de la elaboración de perfiles de usuario. Ordenamos además el conjunto de actividades utilizando un algoritmo multi-objetivo para enriquecer la experiencia turística. También llevamos a cabo un análisis de los flujos turísticos en los destinos, lo que es beneficioso para las organizaciones de gestión de destinos, que buscan entender la movilidad turística. En general, los métodos y algoritmos propuestos en esta tesis se muestran útiles en varios aspectos de los sistemas de recomendación turística.In recent years, recommender systems have become ubiquitous on the web. Many web services, including movie streaming, web search and e-commerce, use recommender systems to aid human decision-making. Tourism is one industry that is highly represented on the web. There are several web services (e.g. TripAdvisor, Yelp) that benefit from integrating recommender systems to aid tourists in exploring tourism destinations. This has increased research focused on improving tourism recommender systems and solving the main issues they face. This thesis proposes new algorithms for tourism recommender systems that learn tourist preferences from their social media data to suggest a sequence of touristic activities that align with various contexts and include affine activities. To accomplish this, we propose methods for identifying tourists from their frequent Twitter posts, identifying the activities experienced in these posts, and profiling similar tourists based on their interests, contextual information, and activity periods. User profiles are then combined with an association rule mining algorithm for capturing implicit relationships between points of interest apparent in each profile. Finally, a rule ranking and activity selection process produces a set of recommendable activities. The recommendations were evaluated for accuracy and the effect of user profiling. We further order the set of activities using a multi-objective algorithm to enrich the tourist experience. We also carry out a second-stage analysis of tourist flows at destinations which is beneficial to destination management organisations seeking to understand tourist mobility. Overall, the methods and algorithms proposed in this thesis are shown to be useful in various aspects of tourism recommender systems

WATERFRONTS FOR WORK AND PLAY: MYTHSCAPES OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY RHODE ISLAND

ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: WATERFRONTS FOR WORK AND PLAY: MYTHSCAPES OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY RHODE ISLAND Kristen A. Williams, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Nancy L. Struna Department of American Studies My dissertation examines the relationship between heritage sites, urban culture, and civic life in present-day Rhode Island, evaluating how residents' identities and patterns of civic engagement are informed by site-specific tourist narratives of eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth-century labor histories. Considering the adaptive reuse of former places of maritime trade and industry as contemporary sites of leisure, I analyze the role that historic tourism plays in local and regional economic urban redevelopment. I argue that the mythscapes of exceptionalism mobilized at Rhode Island's heritage sites create usable pasts in the present for current residents and visitors alike, alternatively foregrounding and obscuring intersectional categories of difference according to contemporaneous political climates at the local, national and transnational levels. This study is divided into two parts, organized chronologically and geographically. While Part I examines the dominant tourist narratives associated with Newport County, located in the southeast of the state and including Aquidneck Island (also known as Rhode Island), Part II takes the historic tourism associated with mainland Providence Plantations as its case study and focuses exclusively on Providence County, covering the middle and northern ends of the state. In each of these sections, I explore, challenge, and re-contextualize the politics of narratives which reference the earliest Anglophone settlers of Rhode Island as religious refugees and members of what scholar Robin Cohen refers to as a "victim diaspora" against the rich co-constitutive histories of im/migrant groups that, either by force or choice, relocated to Rhode Island for work and thus constitute a "labour diaspora." The existence of these two or more populations living in close proximity to each other in areas of Newport and Providence, I argue, produced what Denis Byrne calls a "nervous landscape" fraught with cultural, economic and political tensions which exists even as narratives of the pasts associated with each group are mobilized in the contemporary urban environs of each city and its tourist attractions

Walking Wales: Exploring the experiences of people who walk the Wales Coast Path

At the heart of the thesis is the issue of mobility and how the Wales Coast Path has enabled mobility along the entirety of the Welsh coastline. The creation of the Wales Coast Path has afforded an opportunity unlike any other; to explore what it means for walkers to be able to walk the coastline of an entire nation. This thesis focuses on the physical act of walking the Wales Coast Path. Investigating ways in which experiences of the Wales Coast Path are understood, felt and sensed through the bodily actions and performances of walking. The thesis draws upon the data collected whilst walking with, interviewing and experiencing 41 walks along the Wales Coast Path. It shows that using a ‘walking and talking’ method has accessed data which would otherwise have been left untapped, and that this choice of methodology enables the researcher to access the knowledge of people-in-places where meaning is accessed and produced. The thesis acknowledges that knowledge is born through immediate experience and people gain understanding from their lived everyday involvement in the world, through activities such as walking. It shows that sometimes, it is necessary to see, hear, smell, experience or feel a place in order to communicate it to others and to make sense of it. The thesis considers what it means for walkers to be able to walk the entire coast of Wales and what this accomplishment means to their identities, as walkers, and how it influenced their Welsh identities. The research explores how being able to walk the coast of Wales facilitates a sense of cultural attachment and belonging to Wales; to others who walk the Wales Coast Path; and to Welsh identity. The thesis discusses the more-than-human aspects of walking the Wales Coast Path, focusing on an overriding theme which has affected the experiences of the walkers on the Wales Coast Path arguably more than any other. That is, the influence held over the walkers by the Wales Coast Path sign and the range of emotions and sensations generated through its encounter or lack of encounter. The sign is discussed as relational. It is shown how it has been imperative to people’s experiences and how it doesn’t have a fixed influence but changes in accordance with a particular moment in time on the Wales Coast Path

Beyond Enlightenment

The vast majority of books on Buddhism describe the Buddha using the word enlightened, rather than awakened. This bias has resulted in Buddhism becoming generally perceived as the eponymous religion of enlightenment. Beyond Enlightenment is a sophisticated study of some of the underlying assumptions involved in the study of Buddhism (especially, but not exclusively, in the West). It investigates the tendency of most scholars to ground their study of Buddhism in these particular assumptions about the Buddha’s enlightenment and a particular understanding of religion, which is traced back through Western orientalists to the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation. Placing a distinct emphasis on Indian Buddhism, Richard Cohen adeptly creates a work that will appeal to those with an interest in Buddhism and India and also scholars of religion and history

Shrines and pilgrimage in the modern world: new itineraries into the sacred

The modern pilgrimage - to sites ranging from Elvis's Graceland to the Vietnam veterans' annual Ride to the Wall to Jim Morrison's Paris grave - is intertwined with our existential uncertainties in the face of a rapidly changing world. In a climate that reproduces the religious quest in seemingly secular places, it is no longer clear exactly what the term pilgrimage infers - and this unique glimpse at the modern spiritual journeys critiques our notions of the secular and the sacred, while commenting on the media's multiplication of images that renders the modern pilgrimage a quest without an object. Using new ethnographical and theoretical approaches, this vivid collection offers a surprising new vision on the nonsecularity of the "secular" pilgrimage

Religion, Heritage, and Power： Everyday Life in Contemporary China

Based on an ethnographic study of the religious life of ordinary people in the town of Dongpu, this research explores the relationships between: religion and state power; Chinese ritual (li, 礼/禮) tradition and Christian culture; and religion and intangible cultural heritage in contemporary China. This research found that both the practitioners of Chinese rituals and the Christian community deploy tactics to resist and negotiate with the hegemonic official culture through spatial and religious practices in their everyday life. Chinese ritual practices dedicated to deities and ancestors are defined as idol worship in the doctrine of Christianity and denigrated as feudal superstition in the official discourse of scientism, materialism and atheism. The contrast between Christianity as an orthodox religion and Chinese ritual practices as feudal superstition contributes to the religious hegemony of Christianity over the Chinese ritual tradition, thus rendering most Chinese rituals as lacking in status, although some Chinese rituals have gained legitimacy as intangible cultural heritage. The practice of intangible cultural heritage in contemporary China is subject to the global heritage movement spearheaded by UNESCO and China’s domestic political, cultural and economic agendas. Ordinary people deploy tactics to negotiate with the local/state power in response to the practice of top-down imposed intangible cultural heritage, thus gaining the legitimacy of practicing these rituals. This research presents a poetics of ordinary people’s everyday life. The religious life of ordinary people is foregrounded and exerted as a self-evident entity and heterogeneous culture. This study demonstrates that everyday life can become a cultural experience of alternative modernity and an arena of cultural autonomy. Religious life is never simply equivalent to the homogenising ambitions of any power, such as capitalism, atheism or materialism. The practice of intangible cultural heritage is a process of selecting the ‘heritage in perception’ (i.e., heritage identified and safeguarded based upon UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage) from the ‘heritage in essence’ (i.e., heritage as the self-evident foundation of ordinary people’s everyday life). The safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage channelled from top-down may give rise to cultural hegemony due to the classification of intangible cultures into superior and inferior resources according to the official discourse of developing an ‘advanced culture’ and the principles of a market economy. The expert-centred mechanism of intangible cultural heritage identification rules out the cultural autonomy of genuine inheritors of intangible cultural heritage. Additionally, the identification of the intangible cultural heritage as a narrowly understood territorial property causes conflicts between nations and regions. This may stop the transmission of cultures among ordinary people and undermine UNESCO’s initial agenda of promoting the cultural diversity around the world. Freedom in religion consists in the establishment of a civil society in which the autonomy of people’s cultural practices and religious life is achieved through democratic negotiation between the ruling government and the masses. It is until then that religious culture can be practised and transmitted as a self-evident ordinary culture and intangible cultural heritage by ordinary people in their everyday life

Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World

The modern pilgrimage - to sites ranging from Elvis's Graceland to the Vietnam veterans' annual Ride to the Wall to Jim Morrison's Paris grave - is intertwined with our existential uncertainties in the face of a rapidly changing world. In a climate that reproduces the religious quest in seemingly secular places, it is no longer clear exactly what the term pilgrimage infers - and this unique glimpse at the modern spiritual journeys critiques our notions of the secular and the sacred, while commenting on the media's multiplication of images that renders the modern pilgrimage a quest without an object. Using new ethnographical and theoretical approaches, this vivid collection offers a surprising new vision on the nonsecularity of the "secular" pilgrimage.Vanuit een antropologisch perspectief wordt in dit boek bevestigd dat de mens een voortdurende behoefte aan bedevaart heeft, zelfs in onze moderne wereld. Het boek analyseert op welke wijze de moderne bedevaart verstrengeld is geraakt met menselijke existentiële problemen en onzekerheden, maar ook op welke wijze moderne media beelden scheppen die in staat zijn de behoefte van bedevaarders aan tastbare overblijfselen van het cultobject uit weten te sluiten en daarmee nieuwe vormen van bedevaart kan creëren. Het vervagen van het bestaande opbiechtende paradigma maakt ruimte voor een nieuwe route op weg naar het heilige. Zodoende hebben de tien schrijvers van deze bundel diverse en fascinerende etnografische veldonderzoeken gedaan - variërend van onderzoek naar Soekarno en 'cancer' bossen tot onderzoek naar Jim Morrison en Tito - met de bedoeling om de religieuze factor aanwezig bij deze, op het eerste oog, seculaire plaatsen te vangen en te bevestigen, om zo uiteindelijk het fenomeen van de bedevaart te kunnen beoordelen. Deze bundel distantieert zich van de 'traditionele' bedevaart en op basis van de gewonnen data en de evaluatie van de hoofdtheoretische benaderingen, geeft dit boek een nieuwe visie op moderne vormen van bedevaart en sluit het het concept van 'seculaire bedevaart' uit

Beadwork identity as brand equity: an analysis of the Nyuswa beadwork convention as the basis for craft economies in Kwazulu Natal, South Africa, with specific emphasis on the beadwork of Amanyuswa

The Zulu identity appears to have enjoyed precedence over other polity identities in KwaZulu-Natal for what is largely viewed as time immemorial. Yet, a cursory glance at emergent literature on the Zulu and what has come to be called ‘Zuluness’,, the reification of this identity, reveals that in every instance, where the term ‘Zulu’ is perpetuated, as if an overarching singular socio-political entity, ethical questions emerge . In economic terms these questions become inflamed, particularly within Tourism related industries, where products and services are being sold as authentically ‘Zulu’, thereby negating other potential for varied brand offerings. Much of the body of literature on beadwork appears to be similarly ‘framed’, by this seemingly unopposed view of the Zulu. When juxtaposed against the dire poverty within the province, compounded through HIV/AIDS, and retail sites saturated with ‘Zulu’ product, such as beadwork, the value of brand diversification emerges. Based on this premise, this study examines how polity identity within the Zulu might translate into the alleviation of poverty through micro-economic approaches, by capitalising on visual anthropologies in the form of beadwork identity. To this end, this thesis examines if those, within one such polity, the Nyuswa at KwaNyuswa, in the region known as the ‘Valley of a Thousand Hills’, in KwaZulu-Natal, continue to maintain the use of this identity and elect to define that identity through a beadwork convention. Further, if such forms of denotation can serve as a basis for a departure from the existing position on beadwork and its relationship to the Zulu brand. This study, therefore examines the historical, political, cultural and socio-economic factors which have and continue to impact on the survival of the Nyuswa identity, from numerous theoretical perspectives. Methodologically this study draws on the training and experience of the researcher, as a visual communication design practitioner and educator, employing a reflexive ethnographic research framework through which to interpretivistically deepen understanding on beadwork conventions of the Nyuswa, in relation to other beadwork conventions within the Zulu. Drawing on qualitative data, gained through unstructured interviews and participant observation, by attending numerous traditional events, and in design- based engagements with three craft collectives - Sigaba Ngezandla, Simunye and Zamimpilo, in KwaNyuswa, and with Durban Beachfront Craft retailers and Rickshaw Pullers it discusses various prototype handbags, and Rickshaw cart and outfit designs, developed to test the value of beadwork denotation in serving micro-enterprise and polity-based brands. The findings of this study point to the value of polity-based branding and product development, but also represent the value of visual ethnographic analysis towards understanding the material culture of those from the Nyuswa, the extended Qadi, and the larger Ngcobo polity, many of whom elect to denotatively represent themselves through isijolovane , the beadwork convention said to look like “colorful ‘peas’ floating in a black ‘soup’ “. Examples of which were found across KZN province. These findings not only point to a new way in which oral records might be validated, through beadwork, but also serve to challenge the commonly heralded view, particularly in the Tourism sector, that the Zulu are a singular identity represented by a single beadwork convention known as isimodeni or the view, held by many scholars, that Zulu beadwork is simply comprised of a limited number styles, or as merely denoting large regions, in the KZN province. Instead the outcomes of this study represent a step towards a reconstituted perspective of beadwork as being a denotative tool for communicating polity allegiance and for representing the dispora of identities, within the Zulu, displaced through time and circumstance across South East Africa. These findings are underpinned through the analysis of secondary data, accessed in museums; in beadwork archives, across KwaZulu-Natal; online; and in relevant texts

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia