Dominant Anthropocentrism in the Representations of Nature in Jakarta Post “Destinations” Travel Articles

Travel, travel writing, and tourism industry are today inseparable although travelers are noted to try to distance themselves from tourists. Seen in the critical context of the potential harms caused by tourism, travel article (a sub-genre of travel writing commonly published in mass media) might contribute in one way or another. Therefore, a study on this sub-genre is important to gain a better insight of the degree of its participation in the potentially harmful impact of tourism. This essay covers a study on travel articles from the “Destinations” section of The Jakarta Post between September to December 2017. The articles are analyzed for words, sentences, or passages that in one way or another represent to nature. The purpose of this study is to explore and explain how tourism articles represent nature. By extension, I hope to demonstrate how today’s travel articles might contribute to the potentially damaging impact of tourism on nature. Throughout the research, I discovered that there are seven ways in which writers represent nature in the studied texts. These ways include representations that focus on 1) spirituality, 2) visual beauty, 3) celebration of popular culture, 4) social media presence, 5) mental rejuvenation, 6) prudent treatment of nature, and 7) concern for preservation. Further analysis on these seven ways of representation led to three tendencies in the representation of nature in the twenty articles, i.e. full anthropocentrism (which covers the first five ways of representation), thoughtful anthropocentrism (the sixth way of representation), and relative ecocentrism (the last type of representation). The unbalanced percentage of representations of nature in the first category appears to support the critical opinion of tourism. Therefore, I argue through the analysis that tourism writing contributes despite relatively small to the imminent threat of tourism industry on natural preservation.

On Ontology-Based Tourist Knowledge Representation and Recommendation

In the rapid development of the information technology age, many travelers search for travel articles through the Internet. These travel articles include the experience and knowledge of traveler, which can be used as a reference for tourism planning and attraction selection. At present, the most travel experience and knowledge is available in online travel reviews (OTR). OTR and eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) contain a lot of knowledge of consumers and travelers. Many travelers often look for OTR content through virtual communities, blogs, and search engine, but the search results often cause information overload problems. In addition, through virtual communities, blogs, and search engines, an OTR search still requires using keywords. However, most travelers cannot know the name of the attraction; therefore, travelers cannot use the correct keywords to search. That causes travelers to be unable to get enough information from OTR and unable to make the best travel plan. Therefore, this study focuses on the ontology-based tourist knowledge representation and recommendation method. And the study is to search for popular attractions from the OTR content and construct a tourist knowledge structure for these travelers. When the tourists do not need to know the keywords of the popular attraction name, they just need to get their current location; and then ORT content will recommend the next attraction to the traveler, which helps the traveler make the correct travel decision. The evaluation result showed that the method proposed in this study can help the travelers to quickly make the travel decision and is better than the traditional searching methods.

Hope for Haiti How media narratives can transform a destination in despair

Haiti has been beset by a series of natural disasters over the past decade, notably the 2010 7.0 magnitude Haiti Earthquake and Hurricane Matthew in 2016, which caused catastrophic flooding. However, in addition to the natural disasters, Haiti is the poorest economy in the western hemisphere and has a history of politically turbulent events, each of which have contributed to despair and a negative destination image (Séraphin, 2018; Séraphin et al., 2017). This is a troubling combination for a tourist destination. Haiti, as a destination in the Caribbean, has a strategic advantage with its expansive coast and natural attractions, but the underdevelopment of tourism in Haiti is linked to shadows of natural disasters, economic dependence on foreign aid and political uncertainty (see Séraphin et al., 2017; Wise and Díaz-Garayúa, 2015). The power of nature has placed much media attention on Haiti, and it has gained much negative attention in recent years in the media, but the images of a ‘beautiful destination’ is now changing the narrative to a destination on the rise (Caribbean News Now, 2017a; The World Bank, 2018). However, tourism in a developing country comes with numerous obstacles, as extensive investments are needed to allow tourism to thrive in the increasingly competitive Caribbean market. This is where the media plays a crucial role in transforming how a destination is portrayed. This chapter will assess narratives sourced from newspaper travel articles published in 2017 to understand how presentations of tourism in Haiti are constructing a new image of the country as an emerging tourism destination—an attempt to overcome the range of negative connotations. However, while the chapter focuses on image recovery in relation to the recent natural disasters in Haiti, it must also be noted that Haiti is also a destination with longstanding image issues given the extent of poverty, violence and political corruption (Séraphin, 2018).

Destination Image Evolvement through Experiential Marketing

This qualitative study is an exploratory attempt at understanding destination image through the writings of the travel writers who have undergone the familiarisation or fam programs organised by Tourism Malaysia. The idea behind the program is for the writers to experience first-hand specific destinations in Malaysia and then expressed their experiences through their travel writings. The data in the form of the travel articles were collected with the assistance of Tourism Malaysia based on the suggested criteria established. This study established that it was possible to derive destination image by interpreting the depth of the articles and through the expressions of the travel writers who very often narrated their experiences coherently through vivid depictions and emotions. It is suggested that future studies further test the evolving themes through empirical analyses that are more conclusive and statistically proven.

Translating the representation of the tourist landscape: A corpus-based study

This paper will present a corpus-based study on the translated language of tourism, focusing in particular on the stylistics of tourist landscapes. Through a comparative analysis of a specifically designed corpus of travel articles originally written in English (namely the TourEC-Tourism English Corpus) and a corpus of tourist texts translated from a variety of languages into English (namely the T-TourEC – Translational Tourism English Corpus), the study will investigate a selection of collocates, concordances and keywords related to the description and representation of tourist settings in both corpora. The aim will be that of identifying differences, aspects or practices to be potentially improved that characterize the translated language of tourism with respect to tourist texts originally written in English. Results will show that the discursive patterns of translated texts differ from the stylistic strategies typically employed in native English for the linguistic representation of landscape and settings due to phenomena of translation universals, and that these differences may affect the relating communicative functions, properties and persuasive effects of tourist promotional discourse.

The tourist gaze in English, Italian and German travel articles about Puglia: A corpus-based study

This paper shows how online travel articles may provide important insights into how a tourist destination is perceived and to what extent what is known as the ‘tourist gaze’ may be used to recontextualise tourist material in order to produce more effective tourist texts, which meet receivers’ expectations. For this purpose, three comparable corpora of online travel articles in English, Italian and German language were assembled and analysed in order to understand the way ordinary travellers perceive and experience a tourist destination in Italy (Puglia) by taking language as a point of reference. The first fifteen words of the frequency lists in the three corpora highlighted what landmarks and elements of attraction English, Italian and German travel writers gaze at while on holiday in Puglia. The analysis demonstrated that the Italian tourist gaze is different from the English and German tourist gazes, since not all of them focus on the same landscapes, and even when they gaze at the same sights, their perception and representation are often different. The similarities and differences between the ways the tourists behave suggest a distinction between a model of ‘global gaze’ embodied by English and German travellers, seen as ‘outsiders’, and a model of ‘local gaze’ embodied by Italian tourists, seen as ‘insiders'