Pre- and posttrip factors influencing the visitor experience at a battlefield commemorative event : Gallipoli, a case study

Battlefield tourism is a major component of national and international tourism. This article sets out to provide a holistic understanding of the preevent factors influencing attendance at an event commemorating a famous World War I battle and to follow the cycle through to gain an understanding of what postevent factors influence event satisfaction and how this translates into recommending behavior. The Anzac Day commemorative event at Gallipoli, Turkey, provides the backdrop for this study. A two-step process was used to gather information from Australians partaking in the Gallipoli commemorations in 2007. A preevent questionnaire was distributed to a convenience sample of respondents while they were in transit from Istanbul to Gallipoli for the commemoration. In total, 482 preevent questionnaires were obtained. Step two of this process saw an exit questionnaire administered to a convenience sample of participants on the return journey to Istanbul, resulting in 331 completed postevent questionnaires. The pre- and postevent datasets were separately analyzed using factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) where appropriate. The findings highlight the role of various event attributes, most prominently the ceremonial and experiential aspects of the Anzac Day commemorations, in encouraging visitor satisfaction and further flow-on effects for recommending behavior.

Automatic attribution of ancient Roman imperial coins

Classification of coins is an important but laborious aspect of numismatics - the field that studies coins and currency. It is particularly challenging in the case of ancient coins. Due to the way they were manufactured, as well as wear from use and exposure to chemicals in the soil, the same ancient coin type can exhibit great variability in appearance. We demonstrate that geometry-free models of appearance do not perform better than chance on this task and that only a small improvement is gained by previously proposed models of combined appearance and geometry. Thus, our first major contribution is a new type of feature which is efficient in terms of computational time and storage requirements, and which effectively captures geometric configurations between descriptors corresponding to local features. Our second contribution is a description of a fully automatic system based on the proposed features, which robustly localizes, segments out and classifies coins from cluttered images. We also describe a large database of ancient coins that we collected and which will be made publicly available. Finally, we report the results of empirical comparison of different coin matching techniques. The features proposed in this paper are found to greatly outperform existing methods.

Reading ancient coins: automatically identifying denarii using obverse legend seeded retrieval

The aim of this paper is to automatically identify a Roman Imperial denarius from a single query photograph of its obverse and reverse. Such functionality has the potential to contribute greatly to various national schemes which encourage laymen to report their finds to local museums. Our work introduces a series of novelties: (i) this is the first paper which describes a method for extracting the legend of an ancient coin from a photograph; (ii) we are also the first to suggest the idea and propose a method for identifying a coin using a series of carefully engineered retrievals, each harnessed for further information using visual or meta-data processing; (iii) we show how in addition to a unique standard reference number for a query coin, the proposed system can be used to extract salient coin information (issuing authority, obverse and reverse descriptions, mint date) and retrieve images of other coins of the same type.

Prameyas and J.L. Shaw

Commemorative volume on Jaysankar Lal Shaw, b. 1939, Indian philosopher

Anzac day in the new millennium: insights from New Zealand millennials

Since 1916, New Zealanders have honoured soldiers of war on the 25th of April at commemorative events. The day is now known as Anzac Day, and the acronym ‘Anzac’ stands for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, which was established in World War I. Anzac Day commemorative events are emerging a popular cultural activity in which New Zealanders, many of whom are young, are now participating. From an event management perspective, however, the increasing popularity of attendance at the commemorative events is problematic, with potential to negatively impact the experience of attendance and the sites at which they are held. There is a need to gain a greater understanding of the experience of attendance at the events so that strategies can be developed to maintain and enhance their authenticity and integrity, while optimising their sustainability in the New Millennium.

The aim of this study was to provide information about the experience of attendance from the attendee’s perspective for later use by managers of the events. The study employed the theory of emotions to examine the consumption experience, and used a qualitative approach for this purpose. Two focus groups were undertaken in New Zealand comprised members of the generational segment, the Millennials. The data were analysed considering the literature on emotions, special event tourism, as well as the literature on dark tourism. In some ways, the special event tourism and dark tourism literatures seem to be paradoxical, however, in this study they seemed to compliment each other. A complex set of motivations, emotions and resulting attitudes, behavioural intentions, and behaviours were revealed. With this information, event managers are better able to understand the experience of attendance and consider these issues when developing strategies to manage the events. The results presented here are part of a larger study, as further data is currently being collected on the topic in Australia. Hence, there are opportunities for cross-cultural analysis about this important aspect of New Zealand, and Australian, culture.

Contemporary philosophy and J.L. Shaw

Commemorative volume on Jaysankar Lal Shaw, b. 1939, Indian philosopher.

Numeracy test item readability during transition from pre-school to school

A key test used in Australia to assess the mathematical knowledge of young children uses illustrations of objects such as coins and three-dimensional shapes. This study explored the effects of giving 104 kindergarten children, aged 4-5 years, the questions with either moveable objects or illustrations. It
was found that children who were categorized by their teachers as having “higher levels of numeracy” scored well on test questions using either illustrations or objects, while children who were categorized as having “lower levels of numeracy” scored higher with objects than with illustrations. This result could have implications for consideration of test item readability in relation to graphicacy.

Maritime archaeology and trans-oceanic trade : a case study of the Oranjemund Shipwreck Cargo, Namibia

Routine sand dredging for alluvial diamonds at Oranjemund on the southern coast of Namibia exposed remnants of a long forgotten Portuguese merchant ship believed to have wrecked in the 1530s. The rescue excavations yielded over 40 tons of cargo consisting of thousands of gold and silver coins, tons of copper and lead ingots, and large quantities of ivory together with food refuse, part of personal possessions and the superstructure of the ship. This paper discusses the cargo from the shipwreck. The varying provenances show that overland inter-and intra-regional networks fed into the maritime trade between Europe and the Indian sub-continent. As such, the wreck is a lens through which we can view what was happening on the seas as well as on land. Finally we consider wider issues raised by this discovery relating to the protection and management of such material wherever it may be found in future.

Requiem for Empire : Fabian Ware and the Imperial War Graves Commission

More than one million soldiers of the British Empire died in the First World War. The Imperial War Graves Commission, created in 1917, had as its mandate the obligation to care for their graves and memorials, in 1850 cemeteries in more than 100 countries around the globe. Its founder, Fabian Ware, hoped and expected this Commission to have even more enduring effects, yet the political origins of the organisation remain little understood. This chapter looks beyond the monuments erected by the Imperial War Graves Commission to the ideals and intent of its creators. It argues that the driving force behind this major commemorative work was not a desire to represent any fundamental break with the past, but an attempt to produce an institution that symbolised imperial cooperation and memorialised the war and its dead in a way that would continue to place the British Empire at the centre of world affairs.