Overrun & undermined : the alteration of park atmospheres in the Canadian Rockies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines how the affective atmospheres of park spaces in Yoho and Banff national parks have become incongruous with the desired visitor experience as a result of being increasingly mediated by capital. Yoho and Banff, located in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and Alberta respectively, are Canada’s most longstanding protected areas in addition to being among its most well-known and well-attended. Increasing attendance is one of several changes—along with infrastructure developments, use of social media and smartphones, and park management decisions¬—that have, in recent years, sparked concern among visitors, locals, and park staff of a perceived imbalance in the dual mandate of simultaneously protecting and promoting parks across the country and beyond. I engage with non-Indigenous recreationists, tourists, and locals of Yoho and Banff on a variety of parks-related topics, including the current state of protected areas and their affective atmospheres, including what changes many are hoping to see within them. I employ ethnographic research methods such as semi-structured interviews, informal interactions, nonhuman observation, and “walk-and-talks” on park trails to help learn of the relationships that non-Indigenous people hold with these spaces as well as the values at the core of these relationships. Through the analysis of these interactions and observations, I identify the inherent contradiction embedded within “the world’s craziest mandate” and demonstrate how it is neither protection nor promotion but the balancing of the two that defines the values and desired atmospheres of parks organizations and their patrons. I then explore the ways in which atmospheres have become compromised by processes of fetishization and an increasingly image-centred set of behaviours among growing crowds. I attribute recent atmospheric changes as the result of Parks Canada’s centralization and resultant delocalization of power and point to the integral role of local, intimate knowledges in the management of park spaces.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".