Abstract

Tourist experiences are the product of a temporally extended series of events and activities. The temporal distance from actual experiences distorts the recalled evaluation of their experiences so tourists photograph to record their experiences and consume the place. Tourist photographs build a positive image of a destination when they effectively evoke positive feelings (i.e. affective image) and provide clear information about the physical and functional characteristics (i.e. cognitive image) of the destination. Despite its strong evocative power in constructing a meaning and assessing the place and experience, colour receives little attention in existing tourist photograph literature. Assuming colour as a proxy of tourist experiences, I explore whether, and how, colour in tourist photographs represents tourist experiences and destination consumption. The psychophysical paradigm, which proposes that the quality of the scenery or landscape reflects not only its intrinsic attributes but also the eyes of the beholder, provides a theoretical foundation. A purposely developed colour extraction and analysis tool identifies colour distribution patterns from 2,131 tourist photographs and Leximancer discovers word-like concepts (e.g. regular nouns and adjectives) from the corresponding comments and tags collected from the Facebook of Queensland Tourism Board in Australia. Findings reveal five distinctive groups based on colour distribution patterns and associated concepts. For example, tourist photographs of Fraser Coast show dominantly blue and secondarily orange whereas photographs of Sunshine Coast show balanced blue and orange. Tourist photographs from the destinations sharing similar geographic characteristics often display dissimilar colour patterns. It suggests that destinations can be grouped together by colour patterns and conceptual similarity, instead of geographical characteristics. The results further support that colours in tourist photographs are a significant representamen of tourist experiences and destination image.

摘要

旅游体验是时间上延伸的一系列事件和活动的产物。与实际体验的时间距离扭曲了他们回忆起的对体验的评价，因此游客通过拍照来记录他们的体验并消费这个地方。当旅游照片有效地唤起积极的感受（即情感形象）并提供有关目的地的物理和功能特征（即认知形象）的清晰信息时，旅游照片会建立目的地的正面形象。尽管色彩在构建意义和评估地点和体验方面具有强大的唤起能力，但在现有的旅游摄影文献中却很少受到关注。假设颜色代表旅游体验，我探索是否以及如何，旅游照片中的颜色代表旅游体验和目的地消费。心理物理学范式提出，风景或风景的质量不仅反映其内在属性，还反映观者的眼睛，提供了理论基础。专门开发的颜色提取和分析工具从 2,131 张旅游照片中识别颜色分布模式，Leximancer 从澳大利亚昆士兰旅游局 Facebook 收集的相应评论和标签中发现类词概念（例如常规名词和形容词）。根据颜色分布模式和相关概念，调查结果揭示了五个不同的群体。例如，弗雷泽海岸的旅游照片主要显示蓝色和次要的橙色，而阳光海岸的照片显示平衡的蓝色和橙色。来自具有相似地理特征的目的地的旅游照片通常显示不同的颜色图案。它表明可以根据颜色模式和概念相似性而不是地理特征将目的地组合在一起。结果进一步支持旅游照片中的颜色是旅游体验和目的地形象的重要代表。