Bringing dinosaurs into the 2020s: Considering current visitation and future virtual tourism possibilities for the Tumbler Ridge Museum and the Tumbler Ridge UNESCO Global Geopark (BC)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Designed in collaboration with the Tumbler Ridge Museum and the UNESCO Tumbler Ridge Geopark, I adopted a mixed-methods approach in designing this project. My research examines potential virtual tourism inclusions for the Geopark and the Museum, and considers how these technologies can be used to enhance visitor experiences and accessibility. Core project components are a literature review of virtual tourism technologies and possibilities represented in the academic literature, and empirical data that I gathered via a visitor survey and on-site observations in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada (summer 2022). My literature review found inconsistencies in virtual tourism terminology. As a result, I am proposing a new umbrella term, “virtual tourism experiences (VTEs),” to encourage clarity and ease of access to this topic. VTEs include technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), 360° photo view, live streaming, and webcam-travel. All of these can be used to invite people to connect with remote places and/or on-site experiences. VTEs can be employed engage people during different stages of a user/visitor journey: pre-trip, during-trip, and post-trip. To clarify potential types and uses with respect to trip stages, I am also forwarding a modified conceptual model. It illustrates how various types of VTEs can be employed throughout the user/visitor journey. The Tumbler Ridge visitor survey data that I collected and analyzed generally fits with prior visitor data, but also provides new insights into stays and activities. It also raises some key concerns and contrasting opinions about VTEs—some participants perceived VTEs as potential helpful supplements to physical trips. Others raised concerns about VTEs as threats to nature-based authenticity. My thesis closes with resulting tailored VTE recommendations for the Tumbler Ridge Museum and Tumbler Ridge UNESCO Global Geopark.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".