The image of Prague: an analysis of maps developed from space syntax, guidebooks, and sketch mapping, both cross sectional and longitudinal
Creators: name: Weiland, Joshua Alexander
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2010

description: McGregor (2000) argues that a dynamic approach must be taken in analyzing the relationship between tourist materials on the one hand and tourists' experiences and the meaning that they attach to those experiences on the other: consumers of texts must be "approached to see how they, rather than highly-educated and critically-trained academics, make sense of and create meaning from the narratives. The basis of this approach is the assertion that texts themselves, by themselves, have no meaning" (p. 28). He investigates this relationship through comparing broad categories of experience in travelers' written surveys and guidebooks. This paper will look at texts and experiences through alternate means, developed from guidebooks and tourists' sketch maps (also called cognitive maps and mental maps), and will conduct a third type of map analysis, morphological space syntax analysis, that is intended to be "based on the direct study of buildings and build environments, and guided by concepts formed out of the necessities of this study" (Hillier, 1996, p. 3). The major project of this paper is the construction of these various maps and comparing them. As shown below in the literature review, there are links between these types of maps, for example, between Lynch's (1960) "imageability" and Hillier's (1996) "intelligibility." (Dalton & Bafna, 2003; Long & Baran, 2006). Dalton & Bafna (2003) have established relationships between elements of sketch map and syntactical analysis McGregor (2000) cites MacCannell (1999, first published 1976) as instigating research into whether tourists travel because of their alienation. At stake is whether tourists would look to guidebooks, or whether they would avoid that which is mentioned in them. "[I]t is possible to suggest that the less a particular tourist type cares about the concept of authenticity, the greater the likelihood that textual representations of places will have a strong influence upon their perception of place" (McGregor, 31). McGregor focuses his analysis on the authenticity seekers, on backpackers. The tourists I studied are also backpackers, who tend to be of the group that does care about the concept of authenticity, and should therefore, according to this logical formulation, reject what guidebooks tell them. Therefore, a potential hypothesis is that the maps drawn by backpackers will not correspond particularly well to that presented in guidebooks. This is complicated by the fact that there are guidebooks directed at different groups, Fodor's and Frommer's at a general audience, while Lonely Planet and Rough Guide are directed at this "alternative" backpacker audience. I do not have maps drawn by non-backpackers, so I will not be able to complete a full analysis here. I will be able to test whether the backpackers correspond more closely to the guidebooks that are directed to them or at those directed to a general audience. A secondary section examines syntactical analysis of maps from Prague's history. If tourists are looking for an "authentic" experience, do their drawn maps line up with a certain era's syntactical analysis? Is this an era that the guidebooks stress? This is the type of question that will be addressed below.