So…

I finished them. For what seems like an eternity now, I have been creating guidebooks to every country of the world. At the heart of it all, is the working assumption that where people travel is determined by those who have been before them.

Let me back up a minute. For this project, I was asked to exchange work with someone else and create a thesis project using the other person’s point of view. It was a match made in heaven, as Leslie’s network analysis of online photo-sharing network, Flickr, was a great lens through which to re-examine my own thinking. My investigation began as a desire to characterize the collective conscience of travel.¹

I was compelled to quantify the global scale of tourist movements in a way that would shed light on where the most popular tourist destinations are and why travelers choose to frequent these places. Thanks to generous support from the UN World Tourism Association, I was able to gain access to a database of tourist arrivals by country. I translated their numbers into a series of books that cumulatively represent the global scale of tourist movements in one year. The number of pages within each volume corresponds to the number of documented tourist arrivals in 2005 (100,000 arrivals per page).

The resulting shelf of books is a snapshot of one year’s worth of information. I have been thinking of them both as guidebooks and as massing studies that form a physical world view². The books can be arranged and filtered in various ways³ as a means of comparing and contrasting the tourist potential (or lack thereof) of various places.

I won’t lie, it was a pretty daunting self-prescribed assignment, but I really enjoyed the process. With my crazy Excel sheet acting as a checklist, I chipped away at the countries over the course of our six-week Wintersession. There were skeptics at times (myself included), but I’m quite proud of the final result, as it gives a context to the rest of my thesis. It was important for me to understand for myself the scale and breadth of what I’m dealing with. Global tourism is peppered with all kinds of statistics, lists and quantifications. As the fastest growing industry in the world and the primary source of income for many developing nations, its effects and motivations are far-reaching. Within all this, I’m interested in unpacking the human drive to go somewhere, and to understand the patterns and cycles that occur within the context of tourism.

Guidebooks carry a strange authority in dictating where travelers go. In my own travels I often rely on a guidebook as a means of navigation, to get my bearings in unfamiliar places. But it’s also not uncommon for travelers to chart their every move by the book. Rarely do we question who is writing and editing and whether or not we trust their opinion. In a recent interview series I did with guidebook writers, I asked these questions. The answers I found were surprising. I’ll go into more detail on that in another post. But suffice it to say that within this I saw a connection between my collection of books and a shelf like this:

Due to the nature of the industry, guidebooks thicknesses are seemingly proportionate to the popularity of places. More visitors means more guidebooks sold, which in turn equals greater coverage by writers and editors of the most desirable destinations. It’s all cyclical, like so many things in tourism.

My first prototype was a stab at the most widely visited country in the world, France. Seventy-five million, fifteen thousand people visited in 2003. I played with the idea of adding postcards of the most popular tourist attractions within the country. These were later taken out of the final versions, as they seemed more like a separate idea.

I sketched out what a shelf of volumes of the entire world might look like and how the scale of the pages would work.

I then went into bookmaking mode.

You can view the fruits of my labor here. I’m going to be using these books to generate more projects. An installation of sorts? Posters? Movie?

1. Or rather, a desire to understand the similarities in behavior amongst leisure travelers. For example, posing in front of famous places is often done with an air of irony in this day and age, but one is made more comfortable knowing that everyone else around is doing it as well. [↩]
2. And it’s to scale! [↩]
3. For example, you could rearrange them by size or by continent, for starters. If you really want to get into it, they can be alphabetized. War-torn areas can be compared. Or you could separate out the islands for fun. You know, just in case you are looking for another rainy day activity. [↩]