Travel Writers Online Magazine ISSN 2753-7803 is published as a weblog mainly for writers of narrative non-fiction and for educators who want to integrate this writing into their teaching and research. Our particular specialisms, as the name suggests, are: literary travel writing, blogging about place, and dialogue journaling during research. This all emerged from teaching travel writers and supervising at PhD level in higher education with the aim of exploring ideas of value and the literary in writing as a research inquiry. From this research we ran our first summer school for writers in June 2020, during the first lockdown, and one publication came from that. It is a portable vade mecum listing the Methods for Travel Writers. This is now available as an eBook on all main online stores and in 2022 was converted into a small paperback version through Amazon Kindle Direct.
Over our first two years, I also worked with Jasna through the EU’s ERASMUS+ mobility initiative for university teachers. This allowed us to share our teaching and pedagogy in creative tourism management and English language initially at undergraduate level at the University of Plymouth and the University of Maribor, but later through joint supervision at doctoral level for PhD candidates. We also completed a cooperative writing research project, called 'Both', to investigate remote travel writing whilst supported by an author's editor. This explored technologies for scanning handwritten text and our own design of Web 2.0 platforms for engaging in affirmative dialogue to support the writer in the field. Jasna has published more about the experiences of working with groups of Masters postgraduates using travel writing for improving writing skills in English language teaching, too, reference below.
Our research output and the lessons we had learnt from our experiment and the processual practice led to discussions with the tourism editor at Routledge, part of Talyor and Francis publishers. With encouragement from this new quarter, we committed our transdisciplinary approach to a new book. The book lays the foundations for a process approach to writing as inquiry within the disciplines of tourism, human geography, place-making and city branding. Its key innovations are first, the collection of data through trust-building and dialogue journaling, to form a managed knowledge base. Secondly, we propose ways forward for valuing creative non-fiction as part of assessment at degree level and in the doctoral thesis. This book is now available as Mansfield, C. Potočnik Topler, J. 2023. Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding: Urban Place Writing Methodologies. Abingdon: Routledge.
Potočnik Topler, J. 2021. Teaching Writing Skills in English for Tourism by Employing Travel Writing in Jezik in turizem, Language and Tourism, Sprache und Tourismus Univerza v Mariboru & Univerzitetna založba pp.177-195. DOI: 10.18690/978-961-286-549-8
Do, please Follow us on Google Blogger, preferably from your gmail account. You can view all the Google Blogger blogspots that you follow here, at the link below. You will need our url address to paste-in, so please copy this before you click
We have been exploring form in literary travel
writing here on Travel Writers Online. When we discovered Tim
Hannigan's deep-mapping of a field near Athenry in Ireland, the form of Shelley's 1818 sonnet, 'Ozymandias', echoed throughout the piece. The story is called, 'A Circle on a Map', and can be found over
on the blog called: The Clearing.
The rhyme-scheme of 'Ozymandias', shows how new notes are seeded, and then repeated to hold the verse together:
AB AB / AC DC / ED EF EF
This form can be put into a travel piece to produce seeding and progression. The repetition of an item of
content should give continuity to the travel piece, in the same way that
a rhyme-word provides connection to an earlier point in the sonnet form. The literary travel writer, W G Sebald does this seeding and progression in his story set around Lake Garda. The hotel owner, whom he meets in Limone, returns in the travel story like an echo or rhyme as he continues on his journey. This provides a narrative link and gives the whole piece cohesion. It becomes a story because the readers begin to know the character of the hotel owner. Long after reading, the significance of the hotel owner grows in readers' minds.
I wanted to understand this narrative knowing in literary travel writing and so I treat it in greater depth in the book
Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding: Urban Place Writing Methodologies
I met a traveller from an antique land, A
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, A
If you wish to contact us, please use the secure message form within ResearchGate, the link is on our About page
Please cite our posts like this:
Mansfield, C. (2020). ‘The Black Notebook’ Travel Writers Online ISSN 2753-7803 [Online <travelwritersonline.blogspot.com> Accessed: 13.8.2022].
I've been looking at AI Detectors that are now stable and easy to use. The first one to write about is from a company based in Montreal, and so, as you would expect from that bilingual city, it works on English and French texts. It's called Winston AI. The AI detector tells you if written copy is generated by a human or an Artificial Intelligence text generator robot. It uses a graphic sliding scale. The software also detects plagiarism and presents a thorough list of any copied content it has found. As a user of Winston AI you just paste text into the quick scan option. You can upload bigger documents in the following formats: .docx, .pdf, .png and .jpg for the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system to convert to electronic text from scanned documents or pictures. This also works on handwriting like Google Lens and the other handwritten text readers and convertors do. The Winston AI Detector works in projects, this lets you label or title pieces you are examining for plagi...
Imagining Tourists and Tourism Conference - Paris 19-21 June 2024 Aims of the Conference The conference aims to explore the links between tourism and fiction, and more precisely to consider tourism and tourists as fictions. It is part of a series of conferences organized since 2011 by researchers from the Universities of Geneva, Panthéon-Sorbonne and Berkeley to explore the links between tourism and the imaginary. The first four meetings had evoked how tourism mobilized imaginaries specific to destination countries, their landscapes, their cultures and their inhabitants. The fifth conference will focus on the imaginary that applies to tourists themselves. Imaginary tourists We will examine how the various actors of tourism, as well as the places and practices of tourism, appear in works of fiction. Literature, cinema, theater, song, advertising, etc., stage tourist configurations, which are sometimes at the very heart of these fictions. Fictional tourists include those invent...
Brežice, a place of mystery Photo: Water tower in Brežice, Bine Leben, 20.1.2024 Travel writing from the University of Maribor, Faculty of Tourism. Masters Programme: English in Tourism – Higher Level 2 Author: Teja Leben Mentor: Dr. Jasna Potočnik Topler Brežice, a place of mystery Already from afar, after the highway exit for Krško from the direction of Ljubljana, I notice the silhouette of Brežice, highlighted by the Water Tower and the bell tower of the Church of St. Lovrenc, which I read about before the trip. Both rise above the houses and grove of the old town. Otherwise, you can also see a few taller high-rise buildings next to them, but very few, so even from a distance it can be concluded that Brežice is a small town. I am on the right track, as I would like to discover something more about Brežice and share it with the world. ...
Good to see travel writers online again
ReplyDeleteThank you for your Comment, and support of the blog, Shir. Much appreciated.
DeleteThis is really good lots to peruse
ReplyDeleteShir - are you receiving the email updates from our T.W.O. magazine blog via "follow.it", please?
Delete