‘A fine tourist lure’: Canadian nontheatrical cinema and tourism promotion at the New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using archival research, this essay examines the use of motion pictures as a nation branding strategy at international exhibitions, focusing on Canada’s participation at the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair (NYWF). At the time, corporations, industries, nations, and non-profits sponsored the production of ‘useful films’ as a storytelling device to create meaning without appearing as blatant advertising or propaganda. With their throngs of consumer – and travel-minded visitors, world’s fairs were key nontheatrical exhibition sites for these productions. The essay traces the evolution of the Dominion’s exhibition practices from displaying staple resources and recruiting British and American immigrants to tourism promotion. Meanwhile, Canada had become a pioneer in the use of film technology to publicise itself as a modern vacationland for American tourists. The combination of exhibition and film practice as tourism promotion converged at the NYWF. With the pressing need for US currency to succour Canada’s war effort, government officials wagered that adding a stand-alone film auditorium to the Canadian Pavilion in 1940, primarily screening tourism films, was the most effective way to construct a recognisable national brand aimed at fairgoers.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".