Methods for Travel Writers (ePub)

This methods book is for travel writers and bloggers who are studying to develop their professional and creative practice at university. It is aimed at final year undergraduates and early Masters level postgraduates. Much of the work in developing this book has been drawn from my teaching and research supervision on Masters Programmes for travel writers at universities in Britain, France and Slovenia. Alongside developing your growth and confidence as a literary travel writer it provides an approach that forms the framework for a research project suitable for a postgraduate thesis. For your career, when writing commissions are sought, the book will help you to professionalise your practice so that each new project that you approach is productive from an earlier stage.
Since the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage began to take effect in 2008, travel writers have played an increasingly important role in the curation of cultural activities and practices around the globe. This book helps you take part in that process of exploring, with sensitivity, the places where cultural practices are preserved. Using these teaching materials will provide ways of critically analysing and interpreting the intangible culture and the built heritage encountered in the field when traveling. The activities from the book will enable the preparation and creation of critical commentaries on the discovered practices and artefacts, and the advice will enable writers to understand the management of knowledge through traditional and emerging digital channels. In social media roles, the travel writer's work is often disguised in a job title such as digital content author whilst in the museum world, travel writing is seen as ethnographic interpretation and curation. In 1999 the French Ministry of Culture created the concept of the ethnopôle which has helped better define the professional role of the researcher-writer working in the discovery and mediation of cultural heritage.