‘A fine tourist lure’: Canadian nontheatrical cinema and tourism promotion at the New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it