Marketing Nature: The Canadian National Parks Branch and Constructing the Portrayal of National Parks in Promotional Brochures, 1936-1970
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article studies the promotional publications of the Canadian National Parks Branch by examining how the ideal national park landscape was constructed in booklets. The study adds to literature that examines the shifting purposes of national parks and complements recent studies on representations of national park nature, by extending attention to Canadian park brochures, which have received little attention from scholars. Based on an examination of numerous booklets and extensive archival records on promotional publications, the article argues that rather than merely publicising the parks as they were, the Branch carefully constructed the park ideal in its booklets. This portrayal of parks drew from the parks agency's own ideas regarding the purpose of parks and from the perceived wishes of visitors and society, creating expectations of park nature but also responding to them. The park ideal portrayed in booklets transformed over time. The article illustrates how nature's place and meaning was altered in booklets to create and recreate the parks according to the needs of changing times. In examining the National Parks Branch's promotional brochures and their creation process, the article aids our understanding of the place of national parks and nature in society. It demonstrates how the parks agency redefined parks in response to its own evolving views of parks and society's wishes: changing views of what made parks useful altered their representation and the guiding themes of parks promotion shifted from usefulness and recreation to wilderness museum. Promotional literature carried certain connotations - such as national identity connected to natural landscape - throughout the period, rearticulating them to suit different times. As recent discussions on national parks in global perspective have noted, parks are part of transnational circulation of ideas, hence the Canadian experience can also be seen in a broader context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".