Interrogating the Icelandic imaginary: nation branding and the articulation of national identity in Iceland’s tourism advertisements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rise of nation branding points to the ubiquity and pervasiveness of brands. Under nation branding, the nation state and national identity—like the corporate brand—are transformed into commodifiable entities. Here, national identity is reconfigured to meet the demands of the global marketplace. This project explores the nation branding via tourism advertisements in the context of Iceland and aims to answer the following dual-pronged question: How do Iceland’s tourism advertisements contribute towards the country’s nation-branding strategies? How do the visual and discursive representations of Iceland in tourism media (re)inforce and (re)articulate a mythologized Icelandic national imaginary and identity? In conducting a semiological analysis of four of Iceland’s tourism advertisements, released during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022, this project examines how, through visual and discursive representations, a nationalist image of Iceland—one that upholds the ‘Icelandic imaginary’—is (re)constructed and (re)circulated. Using a synthesis of critical constructivist theories that examine the interconnections between geographies, national imaginaries, tourism representations, branding strategies, and consumption, I develop four key themes (presented as ‘mythologies’)—The Mythology of the ‘Sublime Landscape’ (Iceland as Ontologically ‘Wild’); The Mythology of Inheritance (Iceland as ‘Primordial’: An Authentic Antidote’ to Modernity); The Mythology of Eccentricity (Iceland as ‘Otherworldly’ and ‘Exotic’); The Mythology of Irreverence (Icelandic Humour and Performances of Nonchalance)—that critically examine the effects of nation branding on the formation and articulation of Iceland’s national identity.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".