Communicating the World Heritage brand: visitor awareness of UNESCO's World Heritage symbol and the implications for sites, stakeholders and sustainable management
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The World Heritage (WH) brand signals property so irreplaceable that its values must be sustained intact in perpetuity. A primary function of the WH symbol, one element of the WH brand, is to prompt positive visitor emotions and behaviors favored by management agencies. This paper investigates if the symbol communicates any message to viewers. To determine visitor recognition and recall of the WH symbol tested against a variety of variables, 1827 visitors to five WH sites in Queensland, Australia and 712 visitors to the WH part of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, USA were surveyed. Sixty percent of visitors to the Queensland sites and 19% of visitors to the Hawaii site were aware of the site's WH status; 96% of Queensland site visitors, and 99% of Hawaii site visitors could not recall what the WH symbol represented. Park agencies appear to take a laissez-faire attitude to branding, have little interest or capacity to brand properly or have strategically restricted usage of the WH brand to de-clutter their brand landscape. This limits opportunities to transmit to visitors and communities why WH properties should be valued and sustained, with significant implications for the long-term sustainability of WH sites.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".