Appel à communication : Tourist guidebooks (Pisa/Florence, 11-12 Jun 15)

Tourist guidebooks (Pisa/Florence, 11-12 Jun 15)
Pisa/Florence (Italy), June 11 – 12, 2015
Deadline: Mar 25, 2015

Call for papers Tourist guidebooks: where the vocabulary and the images of Cultural Heritage meet
The conference focuses on the ways in which cultural heritage narrative, vocabulary and imagery intertwine in tourist guidebooks in passages dedicated to urban spaces, landscapes, architecture, figurative art and crafts.
Which words and images are used to describe cultural heritage assets? How are certain items selected through narratives and what is instead left out? What is the role of the author(s) in selecting which cultural assets to include in a guidebook and how to represent them linguistically and figuratively? How do images and the lexical repertoire stabilize to the point of becoming stereotypical? What is the interplay of text and images? These are some of the questions that will be explored.
On the one hand, the conference aims to investigate tourist guidebooks as the locus where the real or virtual tourist experience is shaped and, therefore, their key contribution to the creation of the image of the destination and its heritage. Through description and narration, guidebooks become intermediaries between the reader and the cultural heritage of the destination.
On the other hand, guidebooks should be studied in terms of their relationship with the individual reader, guiding them through a cultural space and focusing on the most representative aspects of specific places and epochs. Moreover, their influence is not limited to the time of travel; they also represent a textual space capable of organizing the traveller’s memories by bringing together actual spaces and the tourist’s subjective experience of them.

Who can participate
The research unit on the Vocabulary of Cultural Heritage is interdisciplinary and multilingual in nature and investigates the synergy between text, language and images. The conference aims at bringing together scholars working in the fields of linguistics, literature, geography, architecture, history, photography, and communication. Travellers are also welcome to participate in the debate Possible topics
– The vocabulary of cultural heritage in tourist guidebooks from synchronic or diachronic perspectives – Translated touirst guidebooks – Different editions of tourist guidebooks – The images of cultural heritage in tourist guidebooks in synchronic or diachronic perspectives
– The imagery of cultural heritage
– The protagonists of tourist guidebooks: authors of texts and images and readers – Interactions with other descriptive genres: tourist guidebooks and travel journals, tourist guidebooks and travel photography
– The study of tourist guidebooks at large: open issues
Deadline Proposals should be submitted by 25 March 2015. Please send your proposal to annick.farina@unifi.it
Abstracts should include the following information
Title:
Type of contribution (presentation/poster):
Author:
Affiliation:
Address: E-mail:

Organizing Committee Annick Farina Tiziana Serena Elena Carpi Gloria Cappelli Carolina Flinz