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The cartography of tourism imaginationing
The map is a convenient and efficient representational instrument for
displaying information spatially. It can both point out where one is and
give directions to where one could travel. Hence, in the cartography of
tourism imaginationing there is a co-ordination of real locations with
actual destinations on the Earth’s surface. In tourism imaginationing there
is, like in a map, a combination of picture and story that brings forth a
cartographic imagery in which locations appear as tourist destinations
possible to be apprehended by a tourist imaginationing.
Image 3.3: The cartography of tourist imaginationing. 23
Yet, however important a role the visual plays in tourism
imaginationings, it is crucial not to conflate a visual image with a picture:
“And this is Iceland! – but I see no ice” (Miles 1852, in Boucher 1989, p.
17). As Wittgenstein once put it; “What is imagined is not in the same
space as what is seen” (Wittgenstein, cited in Olsson 2007, p. 124). A
picture is what we can see with our eyes, but images of whatever kind live
their lives in the space of human imagination, for example as
“simplifications of more complex ideas”, or as “the sum of beliefs,
attitudes, and impressions that a person or group has of an object”
(Nadeau, Heslop, O’Reilly and Luk 2008, p. 84). However image is
theorized, it is important to remember that there is “no simple relationship
between what is directly seen and what is signified” (Urry 1990/2002, p.
146), as we have shown in chapter 2.
Furthermore, as we have noted several times, the significance of
images in tourism is in direct relation to the intangibility of the tourism
23 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive (retreived 2009-04-13)
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