Visual Methods and Visual Analysis in Tourism Research

The tourism experience has always been closely linked to visual communication and photography. Travelers like to bring home visual proofs of their journey or keep visual memories of what they have experienced. The convergence of digital cameras with mobile and networked communication has had a profound impact on visual practices in the tourism domain. This has increased, for instance, the number, relevance, and uses of user-generated visuals. Today’s travelers, the “unsung armies of semiotics,” represent and co-construct tourism experiences by capturing and sharing photographs online. Consequently, visual representations play an instrumental role in the creation of the image of a destination, attraction, or experience – sometimes providing a different view than the one suggested by official channels. Acknowledging the crucial role that visuals play as means or ends, and their importance for researchers as well as practitioners, this chapter is concerned with how to examine the increasing number of visuals and of visual data that is produced by both official sources, like destination marketing/management organization (DMO) websites, and nonofficial sources, such as user-generated content (UGCs) on social media. The first part of the chapter gives a brief overview of methods of visual analysis for the examination (1) of small sets of images (iconographic and semiotic analysis), (2) of larger sets of visual data (quantitative visual analysis), and (3) mixed approaches. The second part of the chapter focuses on the use of visuals for research processes, with emphasis on the potentials of using (1) visuals in interviews (visual elicitation), (2) visitor-employed photography (VEP), and (3) visual-sorting tasks. Future directions in visual tourism research are discussed at the end.