[Air-L] Any Tourism Folks on Air-L?

[Gordon Titchener]

Hi, all.

I'm a relative newcomer to AOIR and I've been impressed with the quality and
quantity of information being shared here!  Many thanks to the generous
community for all your efforts.

I am particularly interested in tourism, critical discourse, online
communities of consumption and the merging of virtual and tangible
destinations, i.e. Ascher's hyperplaces with Eglash's (after Sabel and
Piore) Flexible Economic Networks.

I am not at all sure of the overlap between this list and other
tourism/leisure/sociology/geographic lists such as Trinet (sounds like a
good SNA project?) and would welcome an opportunity to collaborate with
like-minded scholars.  My experience to date suggests much good work is
being completed in the semiotic or critical analysis of tourism, and a large
degree of investment in "hard" informatics to increase operational
efficiency (groups such as IFITT), but not much at all happening in the
nexus of these two areas.  I have been fortunate to work with colleagues at
NZTRI on such projects as destination web-raising and community informatics,
but am eager to know what else is happening out there?

Thanks and best wishes,

Gordon Titchener
A. Professor in Tourism Management, 
Thompson Rivers University (on leave 2008-09)
http://www.tru.ca/tourism/management/faculty/gtitchener.html
Ph.D. Candidate, Auckland University of Technology
http://www.nztri.org/
Director, Dynamic Frontiers Project
http://www.tourismresearch.com