Liz: March 2007 Archives

Where are all the men?

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It's a beautiful late Saturday afternoon in Ann Arbor, MI - home of the massive University of Michigan campus and all-around college town. Mike and I are sitting in a coffee shop near campus. And Mike has just asked a question that's started to interest me, since in the past I've done some observations of people working in cafes: where are all the men?

Most of the people sitting in this cafe are women in groups; most of them appear to be doing homework with laptops, textbooks, and papers, or at least "doing homework." And it's been like this all afternoon. It's not like Michigan has a massive gender imbalance that would explain it. I am consciously trying to resist linking this to the American gender imbalance in grades and college admissions. This is probably just a weird anomaly, but it's kind of weird.

Tourism services

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Ooops. Forgot to publish this when it happened...better late than never, I suppose. Forgive the slideshow errors -- the conversion from my non-standard fonts did not go smoothly.

I'm at the iSchool Information Services and Design Symposium, where I just spoke on "designing for destinations."

The argument, in a nutshell (or an abstract):


Tourism exists in the interplay between places and stories. In making sense of travel, we're also making sense of ourselves and the world around us. Indeed, the global tourist industry produces places as "destinations" through stories and souvenirs. The audience for tourism stories has changed greatly with changes in technologies of communication and representation, with one of the most radical changes the introduction of networked media. With the rise of web-based services, tourist experiences have acquired a digital penumbra of content available in ever more formats and locations. This paper examines these technological changes, and the potential consequences for digital storytelling, travel, and the production of destinations.

This is an attempt to look closely at dimensions of what John Urry has called http://www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences/cgi-bin/fullrecord.pl?handle=30130489">"the tourist gaze"

Slideshow:

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This page is a archive of recent entries written by Liz in March 2007.

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