Tourism and mobile technology

Abstract. While tourism presents considerable potential for the use of new mobile technologies, we currently have little understanding of how tourists organise their activities or of the problems they face. This paper presents an ethnographic study of city tourists ’ practices that draws out a number of implications for designing tourist technology. We describe how tourists work together in groups, collaborate around maps and guidebooks, and both ‘pre- ’ and ‘post-visit ’ places. Implications are drawn for three types of tourist technology: systems that explicitly support how tourists co-ordinate, electronic guidebooks and maps, and electronic tour guide applications. We discuss applications of these findings, including the Travelblog, which supports building travel–based web pages while on holiday

Sandy ideas and coloured days: Some computational implications of embodiment

This paper is an exploration of the relationship between language and vision from the perspective of language evolution on the one hand, and metaphor on the other. Recent research has suggested that the origins of human language capacity can be traced to the evolution of a region in the brain that permits the interaction of information from sensory and motor cortices. In light of this, it is hypothesised that the computational mechanisms of language are derived from those of the sensory-motor domain, and that the pervasiveness of metaphor is one manifestation of language's computational antecedants. A variety of cognitive and computational implications are drawn from these hypotheses