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The purpose of this study is to identify Western travelers' image of Zhangjiajie, China as a tourist destination, drawing on data from contents of web travel blogs.

The study taps the rich content of travel blogs as an alternative research instrument to measure and understand negative and positive images of destinations formed by travelers. Analysis of content drawn from travel blog data followed qualitative methodology techniques and utilized NVivo software.

The study shows that travel blogs can form a good basis for measuring Western travelers' image of destination. This was the case for Zhangjiajie, where analysis of travelers' blogs indicated that they were impressed overall by the destination's beautiful natural scenery and were highly satisfied with nature‐based tourism attractions. The study also expounds on certain aspects of the destination that can be improved to satisfy Western travelers.

The majority of destination image studies rely on structured surveys developed from the researchers' point of view. This study attempts to explore tourists' own perspectives on the nature of a tourist destination by using travel blogs.

This article examines curatorial practices, both traditional and digital, in the Guizhou Provincial Museum’s ethnic exhibition to assess their effectiveness in representing ethnic minority cultures, fostering learning and inspiring curiosity about ethnic textiles and costumes and associated cultures. It also explores audience expectations concerning digital technology use in future exhibitions.

A mixed-methods approach was employed, where visitor data were collected through questionnaires, together with interviews with expert, museum professionals and ethnic minority textile practitioners. Their expertise proved instrumental in shaping the design of the study and enhancing the overall visitor experience, and thus fostering a deeper appreciation and understanding of ethnic minority cultures.

Visitors were generally satisfied with the exhibition, valuing their educational experience on ethnic textiles and cultures. There is a notable demand for more immersive digital technologies in museum exhibitions. The study underscores the importance of participatory design with stakeholders, especially ethnic minority groups, for genuine and compelling cultural representation.

This study delves into the potentials of digital technologies in the curation of ethnic minority textiles, particularly for enhancing education and cultural communication. Ethnic textiles and costumes provide rich sensory experience, and they carry deep cultural significance, especially during festive occasions. Our findings bridge this gap; they offer insights for museums aiming to deepen the visitor experiences and understanding of ethnic cultures through the use of digital technologies.

This chapter examines changing attitudes towards exhibiting Chinese immigration in New Zealand. Drawing on archival research and qualitative interviews with subject experts and visitors, three museums are discussed: national narratives at the New Zealand Maritime Museum in Auckland and The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington; and regional representations at the Toitū Otago Settlers Museum in Dunedin.

The exhibition analysis shows that multicultural narratives of tangata tiriti immigration including Chinese only became prevalent in the 1990s, when changing attitudes in society at large and progressive immigration legislation influenced strategies of display.

These modernised national narratives propagate a multicultural paradigm. However, exhibiting Chinese immigration history constitutes only a small part of the larger mission of national museums. Accordingly, narratives of Chinese immigration remain superficial, serving celebratory representations of ethnic communities, while racism and discrimination are an important, but not central aspect of these narratives.

At the regional level, Toitū re-invented itself into a social history museum with a more inclusive and reconciliatory agenda, with a redesign in 2013 subsuming Chinese immigration into an intercultural narrative, featuring alongside other minority groups with a focus on cultural contact and exchange.

Nevertheless, all three museums still rely on narratives based on minorities and majorities arranged around a stable hegemony. Consultation and cooperation with Māori also reveal the wish to be presented as first people, set apart from tangata tiriti. That way biculturalism seems to act as a dividing force spatially, but thematically both immigration histories are more and more intertwined.

This study aims to elucidate the value creation process within a culturally diversified museum (CDM), which aims to achieve social inclusion, i.e. bridging the social divide between mainstream and minority communities, through the integration of CDM’s and visitors’ resources. Using service logic (SL) theory as the theoretical lens, we aim to unveil the CDM’s unique service provider and customer (visitor) resources, the corresponding resource integration process that explains value co-creation and co-destruction and the resultant value outcomes for social inclusion.

A case study of an Australian CDM is used, involving various qualitative data sources, including depth interviews, focus groups, visitor book content analysis, on-site observation and participation in the CDM’s events and forums.

The findings provide insights into the unique CDM and visitor resources that are integrated to achieve value outcomes that foster social inclusion. However, the results suggest that alongside value co-creation, co-destruction can unfold, causing a (mis)alignment with the aim of the CDM to bridge the social divide between mainstream and minority communities.

This study’s findings offer salient implications for CDMs and similar service providers that enables social inclusion and policymakers.

This study contributes to the service domain by highlighting the importance of the alignment between provider and customer resources to co-create value within a culturally diversified context. That is, CDMs can learn from the misalignment of their resources and those of their visitors to improve their resource offerings and achieve greater social inclusion outcomes in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to investigates if and why audience gender ratios vary between museum YouTube channels, including for museums of the same type.

Gender ratios were examined for public comments on YouTube videos from 50 popular museums in English-speaking nations. Terms that were more frequently used by males or females in comments were also examined for gender differences.

The ratio of female to male YouTube commenters varies almost a hundredfold between museums. Some of the difference could be explained by gendered interests in museum themes (e.g. military, art) but others were due to the topics chosen for online content and could address a gender minority audience.

Museums can attract new audiences online with YouTube videos that target outside their expected demographics.

This is the first analysis of YouTube audience gender for museums.

This paper aims to analyse the socio-economic role of museums.

To explore the socio-economic role of museums, relevant literature on the role of museums was reviewed. Books and articles were consulted to shed light on museums as a cultural tourism product offering within the broader context of tourism as a catalyst of societal development.

The literature review revealed that museums are symbols of unity and identity and can serve as a catalyst of economic development of local communities. The article dispels the perception that museums are places where old stuff is stored and that they are at the periphery of societal development.

The paper is based on literature review and not an empirical study.

This paper proposes that museums should play a more active role in the socio-economic development of society.

This paper suggests that museums should educate the public about their role and place in society. Most importantly, they should create awareness about the socio-economic opportunities which they create. Thus, museums should position themselves as part of the societal effort to deal with societal challenges and not relegate themselves to the fringes of society. To this end, museums should establish partnerships with other agents of societal development. These organisations include chambers of commerce, educational institutions, government agencies and tourism organisations.

The paper dispels the perception that museums are places where old stuff is stored and that they are at the periphery of societal development.

This paper examines the Art Institute of Chicago – a nationally recognized museum – as a white sanctuary, i.e., a white institutional space within a racialized social system that serves to reassure whites of their dominant position in society. The purpose of this paper is to highlight how museums create and maintain white spaces within the greater context of being an institution for the general public.

The empirical analysis of this study is based on collaborative ethnographic data collected over a three-year period of time conducted by the first two authors, and consists of hundreds of photos and hundreds of hours of participant observations and field notes. The data are analyzed using descriptive methods and content analyses.

The findings highlight three specific racial mechanisms that speak to how white spaces are created, recreated and maintained within nationally and internationally elite museums: spatiality, the policing of space, and the management of access.

Sociological research on how white spaces are maintained in racialized organizations is limited. This paper extends to museums’ institutional role in maintaining white supremacy, as white sanctuaries.

This paper adds to the existing literature on race, place and space by highlighting three specific racial mechanisms in museum institutions that help to maintain white supremacy, white normality(ies), and serve to facilitate a reassurance to whites’ anxieties, fears and fragilities about their group position in society – that which helps to preserve their psychological wages of whiteness in safe white spaces.

Digital language has meant a revolution in the methods of production, distribution and conservation of contemporary art. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the new status of museums within the digital age. Works using new media must be understood as spaces of non-hierarchical communication where an artist’s role is diluted and the public becomes a user that completes an open process. Therefore, the function of the museum is challenged, being no longer a moral authority or a place of storing physical works. Because of its instability and obsolescence, the only valid method for the conservation of digital art is permanence through change.

This research contrasts the theoretical material emerged in the past years related to the characteristic of new media to the practical work of conservation of digital pieces made by the new generation of museums and cultural centres. In addition, the fresh material offered by the Web itself allows analyzing the virtual activity of the museums themselves and the new platforms (online labs, databases, websites and blogs) arisen in the past decades. The latter are perfect examples of the new paths opened by the digital contemporary technology offering collective sites of communication in real time.

The preservation of digital and intangible heritage is understood as a form of development of a collective memory that can help in the understanding of our age in the future. In this way, the goals and the responsibilities are common; citizens are required to keep an active culture that is no more a culture of the accumulation and concentration by a minority. In present context, there is a new possibility, maybe for the first time in history, of achieving a new narrative really democratized and decentralized through the new ways of interacting and sharing information offers by digital media.

The urgency of getting an open and free access to information and technology is part of the idiosyncratic of digital art. There is a real aim of generating alternative spaces of knowledge serving public interest, being apart from the economic and political interests of large corporations. In this respect, the role of the museum will be controversial. First of all, as an institution originally created to impose power and moral authority by the governments.

Museums remains as the main artistic institution nowadays. However, they are in a difficult position as a traditional space for preserving and exhibiting art. That is why, they are adapting themselves to the new digital context helped by offering practical databases and updated information on their collections via websites and social networks.

Non-Anglo-Celtic immigrants have transformed Australian rural landscape through the construction of public and private spaces expressing their cultural heritage. These sites can also significantly impact the dynamics of social cohesion and intercultural relations in multicultural rural communities. This chapter links heritage and multiculturalism in rural settings and explores the potential role of the sites built by rural ethnic minorities in facilitating intra- and intergroup social networks. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part briefly explores the literature on immigration and heritage, place, belonging and social cohesion, and the relationship between social capital and the built environment. The second part outlines preliminary empirical findings from Griffith in New South Wales. Using the concepts of intercultural dialogue and bonding and bridging social capital, the chapter explores the role of the places built by Italian immigrants in facilitating social networks and improved relations within and between Griffith's ethnic communities.