Travel Writers Online

 Slow Tourism The ports on the English Channel, or La Manche if you're sailing from France, remain unexplored by motorists so we began a research project to slow down the tourism to enjoy the journey itself. First, leave the car behind and take the train. Brittany Ferries sail from three key ports on the south coast of England: Plymouth, Poole and Portsmouth with 5 destinations: Roscoff, Saint-Malo, Cherbourg, Ouistreham and Le Havre. As researchers, we settled on Cherbourg since my only recollection of the port was driving through it very quickly from the ferry. First, though, was the library research. The outcome from this study of archives was a book chapter on Cherbourg and perry for Palgrave Macmillan. Cherbourg - Perry and Roland Barthes Derek uncovered archive material on the production of a regional drink in Normandy made from pears. As a speciality drink, perry seems missing from the ethnobotany of Cherbourg. Although during the research we did find a company called M...

This is a Teaching & Learning Resource for Tourism and Heritage Management Studies, designed to fit on a smart-phone screen for downloading and use in the museum or gallery.   ⬢ The Docent's Six Steps of Presenting a Work The art works referred to here are held in Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery, in particular this study guide focuses on Frances Reynolds and the paintings by her brother. Docents or museum tour-guides can use a 6-point scheme to help them remember what to cover for each painting or sculpture they present to their audience. This guide goes through each one of those 6 points to help you plan your docenting … ⬢ 1 Biography of the artist: Using past tenses Frances and Joshua Reynolds were born and grew up in Plympton near Plymouth in Devon.  Frances' brother, Joshua completed his apprenticeship with Thomas Hudson in the middle of the 18th century.  He also spent some time studying painting in Rome.  Frances, depicted in the painting, was a...

I read and reviewed Tim Hannigan's (2021) TheTravel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre , back in July 2021, please see full review on Amazon, so I became too impatient to wait until I could buy the hardback of Tim's 2023 book, and have started to read it on the iPad. It gives me the opportunity, though, to express my delight at my favourite early scene from Tim’s Cornish journey in The Granite Kingdom   The exact spot where… When I'm teaching, I encourage my student-writers to focus on embodied experiences at precise locations to enact the physicality of the layout of the land, the term that we borrow from geography in literary tourism studies is poetic geomorphology. My chosen scene from Tim's travel book on Cornwall has already found its way into my workshops. I will be careful not introduce spoilers as I share the moment below. I have taken the Mousetrap Oath. ‘The water was shallow here, glittering over stone, but what I was contemplating seemed horri...

Fieldwork in Brežice, Slovenia Our first day of fieldwork was Monday 15th May 2023. We made a planned walk into town along Old Justice Street, Ulica stare pravde , and made a stop at the water tower, Vodovodni stolp Brežice. The weather was brightening all the time after a couple of rainy days. The Posavje I made my first visit to The Posavje Museum in Brežice just before 5 o'clock on Tuesday 16th May 2023. That was my reconnaissance visit aiming to look in almost every room for first impressions and to see if any artefact would stay in my memory for later detailed investigation. I also had in mind the painting from the museum's web list, of the hay-drying racks and buckwheat in flower by Miroslav Kugler because we had discussed that on the dialogue platform before my visit to the university tourism faculty. Alas, I could not find Kugler's painting but I wanted to keep moving rather than make a focussed study at this initial stage. An Ellipse of Plateaus On Wednesday ...

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...