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Towns and cities across Canada face rapidly changing economic circumstances and many are turning to a variety of strategies, including tourism, to provide stability in their communities. Community Economic Development (CED) has become an accepted form of economic development, with recognition that such planning benefits from a more holistic approach and community participation. However, much of why particular strategies are chosen, what process the community undertakes to implement those choices and how success is measured is not fully understood. Furthermore, CED lacks a developed theoretical basis from which to examine these questions. By investigating communities that have chosen to develop their tourism potential through the use of murals, these various themes can be explored. There are three purposes to this research: (1) to acquire an understanding of the “how” and the “why” behind the adoption and diffusion of mural-based tourism as a CED strategy in rural communities; (2) to contribute to the emerging theory of CED by linking together theories of rural geography, rural change and sustainability, and rural tourism; and (3) to contribute to the development of a framework for evaluating the potential and success of tourism development within a CED process.

Two levels of data collection and analysis were employed in this research. Initially, a survey of Canadian provincial tourism guides was conducted to determine the number of communities in Canada that market themselves as having a mural-based tourism attraction (N=32). A survey was sent to these communities, resulting in 31 responses suitable for descriptive statistical analysis, using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). A case study analysis of the 6 Saskatchewan communities was conducted through in-depth, in person interviews with 40 participants. These interviews were subsequently analyzed utilizing a combined Grounded Theory (GT) and Content Analysis approach.

The surveys indicated that mural development spread within a relatively short time period across Canada from Chemainus, British Columbia. Although tourism is often the reason behind mural development, increasing community spirit and beautification were also cited. This research demonstrates that the reasons this choice is made and the successful outcome of that choice is often dependent upon factors related to community size, proximity to larger populations and the economic (re)stability of existing industry. Analysis also determined that theories of institutional thickness, governance, embeddedness and conceptualizations of leadership provide a body of literature that offers an opportunity to theorize the process and outcomes of CED in rural places while at the same time aiding our understanding of the relationship between tourism and its possible contribution to rural sustainability within a Canadian context. Finally, this research revealed that both the CED process undertaken and the measurement of success are dependent upon the desired outcomes of mural development. Furthermore, particular attributes of rural places play a critical role in how CED is understood, defined and carried out, and how successes, both tangible and intangible, are measured.

In 2010, 12 years after the signing and popular ratification of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (BGFA), the decommissioning of Irish Republican Army (IRA) weapons, and a significant decline in political violence, paramilitary public symbolic displays (PSDs) remained as prominent features of the landscape of Northern Ireland. Their contents and locations constituted an important, contradictory, and contested part of the peace process. We argue that paramilitary murals and other symbolic sites, such as memorial gardens and plaques, continue to tap into ethno-national collective identities forged in conflict but also exhibit a range of reframing strategies that we refer to as historicization, articulation, and suppression. We further argue that contextual factors affect the likelihood of these displays appearing within a given geographic area. To assess these hypotheses, we conduct content and geospatial analyses of all identified PSDs in West Belfast in 2010. The results lend support to a context-sensitive approach to predicting the contents and locations of paramilitary PSDs in Northern Ireland.

Currently, the Tang tomb mural cultural relic resources are presented in a multi-source and heterogeneous manner, with a lack of effective organization and sharing between resources. Therefore, this study aims to propose a multidimensional knowledge discovery solution for Tang tomb mural cultural relic resources.

Taking the Tang tomb murals collected by the Shaanxi History Museum as an example, based on clarifying the relevant concepts of Tang tomb mural resources and considering both dynamic and static dimensions, a top-down approach was adopted to first construct an ontology model of Tang tomb mural type cultural relics resources. Then, the actual case data was imported into the Neo4J graph database according to the defined pattern hierarchy to complete the static organization of knowledge, and presented in a multimodal form in knowledge reasoning and retrieval. In addition, geographic information system (GIS) technology is used to dynamically display the spatiotemporal distribution of Tang tomb mural resources, and the distribution trend is analysed from a digital humanistic perspective.

The multi-dimensional knowledge discovery of Tang tomb mural cultural relics resources can help establish the correlation and spatiotemporal relationship between resources, providing support for semantic retrieval and navigation, knowledge discovery and visualization and so on.

This study takes the murals in the collection of the Shaanxi History Museum as an example, revealing potential knowledge associations in a static and intelligent way, achieving knowledge discovery and management of Tang tomb murals, and dynamically presents the spatial distribution of Tang tomb murals through GIS technology, meeting the knowledge presentation needs of different users and opening up new ideas for the study of Tang tomb murals.

The authors provide an understanding of how the hero identity is culturally constructed and evolving. The authors focus on heroism within an arts marketing framework through an interrogation of Northern Ireland murals. In this paper, the authors elaborate on the links between arts marketing thought and the notion of hero and draw conclusions around what the authors see as a fruitful area for arts marketing theory.

The authors have adopted a narrative approach, incorporating biographical method, visual analysis and ethnography in interpreting cultural murals. The authors assess representative examples in Northern Ireland using a thematic framework.

The murals the authors assessed have evolved from having a specific community focus to increasing numbers which now represent a “shared”, and therefore more modern version of the hero.

The authors identify an emerging, aesthetically balanced portrayal of cultural murals, with a different set of heroic priorities compared to the past, which should encourage further related research elsewhere.

Northern Ireland murals are no longer the preserve of specific communities and are now also shared spaces which appeal to both the local population and cultural tourists.

Although analysis and evaluation of political murals has been carried out in other disciplines, the authors add to the limited insight from an arts marketing perspective.

Dunhuang murals are rich in cultural and artistic value. The purpose of this paper is to construct a novel mobile visual search (MVS) framework for Dunhuang murals, enabling users to efficiently search for similar, relevant and diversified images.

The convolutional neural network (CNN) model is fine-tuned in the data set of Dunhuang murals. Image features are extracted through the fine-tuned CNN model, and the similarities between different candidate images and the query image are calculated by the dot product. Then, the candidate images are sorted by similarity, and semantic labels are extracted from the most similar image. Ontology semantic distance (OSD) is proposed to match relevant images using semantic labels. Furthermore, the improved DivScore is introduced to diversify search results.

The results illustrate that the fine-tuned ResNet152 is the best choice to search for similar images at the visual feature level, and OSD is the effective method to search for the relevant images at the semantic level. After re-ranking based on DivScore, the diversification of search results is improved.

This study collects and builds the Dunhuang mural data set and proposes an effective MVS framework for Dunhuang murals to protect and inherit Dunhuang cultural heritage. Similar, relevant and diversified Dunhuang murals are searched to meet different demands.

The purpose of this paper is to build a mobile visual search service system for the protection of Dunhuang cultural heritage in the smart library. A novel mobile visual search model for Dunhuang murals is proposed to help users acquire rich knowledge and services conveniently.

First, local and global features of images are extracted, and the visual dictionary is generated by the k-means clustering. Second, the mobile visual search model based on the bag-of-words (BOW) and multiple semantic associations is constructed. Third, the mobile visual search service system of the smart library is designed in the cloud environment. Furthermore, Dunhuang mural images are collected to verify this model.

The findings reveal that the BOW_SIFT_HSV_MSA model has better search performance for Dunhuang mural images when the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and the hue, saturation and value (HSV) are used to extract local and global features of the images. Compared with different methods, this model is the most effective way to search images with the semantic association in the topic, time and space dimensions.

Dunhuang mural image set is a part of the vast resources stored in the smart library, and the fine-grained semantic labels could be applied to meet diverse search needs.

The mobile visual search service system is constructed to provide users with Dunhuang cultural services in the smart library. A novel mobile visual search model based on BOW and multiple semantic associations is proposed. This study can also provide references for the protection and utilization of other cultural heritages.

Trending in modern interior design frameworks is an integration of real and simulated (i.e. photographs, murals) elements of nature into buildings, and a number of interdisciplinary studies concern the effects of nature on various aspects of human functioning. The purpose of this paper is to measure employees’ self-reported levels of affective organizational commitment (AOC), perceived productivity, well-being, attention restoration and satisfaction at work to explore how each mural is conceptualized and to make recommendations to hospital administrators and facilities managers as they make decisions concerning mural design and placement. One hospital had a biophilic mural and the other had a bold abstract mural.

The research was carried out using post-occupancy evaluation and mixed-methods survey design.

Employees in both hospitals disagreed that their organizational commitment (OC), perceived productivity or well-being at work had improved since the new murals had been installed. Responses from both hospitals were also low concerning perceptions of attention restoration. Indeed, no significant differences between hospitals were found. Correlations among scales were found within hospitals that support published studies. More correlations occurred at the hospital where employees viewed the biophilic mural (e.g. between OC and perceived productivity, and between satisfaction with the physical environment and perceived productivity). At both sites, satisfaction with the physical environment correlated with OC.

The authors expected that those working within view of the biophilic mural would report stronger ratings of AOC, perceived productivity, well-being, attention restoration and satisfaction with the workplace than employees with a view of the abstract scene. No differences between groups were found; responses to psychosocial scale items asking about whether attitudes had improved after the retrofit were low or neutral for employees in either hospital. However, more correlations between scales that support existing literature were revealed for those working near the biophilic mural. Thus, the authors recommend architectural programming before a design change to gather insight on occupants’ preferences at work.

This article aims to describe the process of documenting outdoor murals of a metropolitan community in the Midwest and disseminating the information through a library hosted web publication.

The outdoor murals are surveyed and photographed by an academic fine arts librarian, the author. Access is created via a web publication, supported and developed through library resources.

The project not only increases access to works by local artists, but serves as a resource for historical images when, or if, a work becomes damaged or is removed.

This new pathway to public art serves as a bridge between the campus and the community.

The purpose of this study is to document how a traditional residential neighborhood, Ihwa village in Seoul, South Korea, is transformed into a tourist attraction and demonstrate the complexity of the overtourism phenomenon and the multifaceted conflicts among stakeholders that emerged in the course of urban transformation. Particularly, the study explores how tourism growth, urban transformation and overtourism are intertwined with each other and how the role of social media and media contributed to tourism growth and the transformation of an urban neighborhood.

The study conducted text analytics (a big data analysis) using personal blogs and news articles. Our data for text analytics was defined to retrieve all news articles and blogs existent in the NAVER portal, the largest Korean portal and search engine, for the period between January 1, 2006, and December 31, 2018. The data was collected using a web crawling program, TEXTOM version 3.0.

Text analysis of blog entries and news articles suggests that each medium has its unique role and domain to play. While the news media contributed to the initial surge of interest in Ihwa village, genuine growth of tourism in Ihwa village seems to be attributed to social media. Texts that appeared in blogs strongly indicated that people used their blogs to share their trip experiences, which can be subsequently assumed that blogs had an influential role in promoting a small place like Ihwa mural village, while news articles tended to highlight negative or unusual events occurred in Ihwa village. The study also addressed the multifaceted nature of the conflicts that were inherent in the issue of urban regeneration and how those conflicts were developed and manifested in the process of touristification and overtourism in Ihwa village. As touristification can manifest in various forms in different places, the case of Ihwa village demonstrates a unique development of touristification; private tourism companies or tourism agencies did not initiate or intend to cause tourism gentrification. Rather, touristification is a byproduct of urban revitalization through public art and is a result of interplay between the local government’s interest, social media and new tourist demand.

Text analytics using big data have rarely been attempted to understand the role of social media in relation to tourism growth and touristification of an urban tourism place. This study advances the literature by applying big data analysis to user-generated content in blogs. The study also contributes to the deeper understanding of a different developmental pattern of touristification in an urban tourism place as well as the complexity of the overtourism phenomenon and the multifaceted conflicts among stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the subjects contained in the Dunhuang mural images as well as their relation structures.

This paper performed content analysis based on Panofsky’s theory and 237 research papers related to the Dunhuang mural images. UNICET software was also used to study the correlation structures of subject network.

The results show that the three levels of subject have all captured the attention of Dunhuang mural researchers, the iconology occupy the critical position in the whole image study, and the correlation between iconography and iconology was strong. Further analysis reveals that cultural development, production, and power and domination have high centralities in the subject network.

The research samples come from three major Chinese journal databases. However, there are still many authoritative monographs and foreign publications about the Dunhuang murals which are not included in this study.

The results uncover the subject hierarchies and structures contained in the Dunhuang murals from the angle of image scholarship which express scholars’ intention and contribute to the deep semantic annotation on digital Dunhuang mural images.