Valentine's day Invitation by European Treotters

For our assignment we decided that the sender of this Valentine's Day invitation could be some student union and the receiver could be a group of students who would like to spend time together in a special evening, different from the usual.
The design fits of the invitation is very nice and suitable for the occasion, thanks to the colors (in particular pink, purple and white) and for the hearts; it appear too happy and attractive and we think that it would capture the curiosity of the students.
We was thinking that is a good idea to add a picture on the invitation about the travel because it is our central theme and we know also that the union of the verbal and visual is very effective, more convincing and interesting.

Surely the purpose of the group is to promote some kinds of values; the aim of the invitation is to offer a night of enjoyment and relaxation, and a chance of a romantic escape for someone who has been unfortunate in love; emphasis on the purpose is not to judge those "unfortunate"..but to create for them a good occasion to meet new people and spending time together.
Furthermore the purpose is not to promote Valentine's Day as a specific international day for love but to make it possible any day as a blissfully romantic escapade that is not tied to any specific day.
Our purpose is also to bring travel into anything what'd make a romantic escape better than an adventure; a romantic location abroad for the lucky winner of the lottery.

Visual characteristics

Our third assignment was to log in to Pinterest, find photos to do with our theme and pin the ones we found interesting. As our blog focuses on traveling we decided to pin pictures from our favorite destinations: unforgettable places we have visited or maybe dream to visit one day.

Source

Our board consists of pictures from a variety of countries such as Ireland, Philippines, Japan & Australia. The board downright shouts vacation!

All the pinned photos are colorful and picturesque and they were shot outdoors. Other common    qualities are nature and landscape. An element that appears in notably many of our boards pictures is water. We also thought that the pictures could’ve all been taken by a pro.

Even though the photos have lots in common, they too differ in many ways: color, country, view angle, time of year, environment and the list goes on… There are pictures of peaceful places with no sign of people but pictures of crowded cities as well.

The origin of the pictures? Someone travels to a place and takes a picture to capture the moment. These travel destinations were in that moment emblematic to the photographer, in such scale that they now want to share them with others – we have to note though that a user sharing has not necessarily taken the picture. The aim is to more or less commercialize the place and adduce why this specific attraction should be visited.

Source

Some of the photos were probably taken by a private person and few by a company, but the minute they were uploaded online (for different purposes: personal profiles or travel sites etc.), they possibly started to spread like wildfire. The pictures could’ve first been used for advertising and now they're just circulating, cause people find them pretty. This might have led to a situation where a person sharing a picture does not know the origin of it.

- N.K.

This was what the European trotters came up with this time!

Lexical, syntactic and textual characteristics

For this week assignment we needed to pick a forum and analyze the comments’ textual, syntactic and lexical characteristics. Since our blog’s theme is traveling it felt natural to pick a forum focusing on that subject, and so we chose to focus on Tripadvisor and especially one particular hotel listed on the site, Santa Claus Holiday Village. Tripadvisor is a site dedicated to traveling; it’s a search engine of sorts, helping people find hotels, inns and flights at and to their chosen destinations. The site hosts over 200 million reviews, opinions and photos. Reviewers have to sign in to the site in order to leave a comment of their chosen location, either via their Facebook, Google+ or Samsung account, or by using the site’s own log in system. All comments and reviews are moderated and go through a screening process before published on the website, which normally takes about 24-48 hours.

Lexical characteristics found in the comments:

The language used in the comments was usually grammatically correct. However, we did find one acronym used (s.c. for Santa Claus) and one emoticon, :). There was also a comment left by the username username cherrywong: “The staffs r friendly n helpful”, which uses a few shortened words. All in all the user reviews were written in clean English.

We are all looking at you, cherrywong.

Syntactic characteristics found in the comments:

As stated above, the comments were in general very well written, people had clearly put in time and effort to give a rounded and well-supported opinion of the hotel. However, there were some comments that were lacking verbs or were using unnecessary dashes and dots, perhaps to emphasize their point or for stylistic reasons, such as one comment that read: “When in Roveniemi - especially winter time & Christmas - look no further. Little cabins beside Santas park & shops makes this a great stay! Especially for families. Where you can also find reindeers lurking, Santas post office & restaurants...a wonderful wonderful magical place! Some of our best memories were made here. Already planning to return :)”

Textual characteristics found in the comments:

Even though there was not much to be said of the comments in terms of syntactic and lexical characteristics, textual characteristics make up for them in great amounts. For example, multimodality could be seen on the site in terms of the stars used to grade the hotel for location, service, rooms, cleanliness and so on. The site also gives people titles in terms of how much they have contributed, which might add or reduce the value of the reviews left by said user. The people who have registered to the site also have personal profiles which could be seen as a way to create networked context.

Identification is mandatory on the site, but it does not mean you have to comment using your own name. Some people choose to use their real first name as a username, sometimes mixing in letters - e.g. Vicky75_11 - some prefer to use pseudonyms, for example “druindubai”. The commenters’ place of residence is also displayed.

The struggles of a Tripadvisor user.

The site system offered little in the terms of dialogue. The staff of the hotel could answer the questions and feedback left by the reviewers, and you can also ask more about the hotel from the people who’ve left comments. There is also an option to rate a review, which could be considered a dialogue of sorts.

As noted before the comments were well written, almost nobody used slang words etc. Humor and playful titles were used every now and then to emphasize the writers point, such as “I would have strangled an elf for a beer after 8pm”, "If heaven was a place on earth...”

Elves should never stand between a man and his beer.
- a Finnish proverb?

The reviewers also used a lot of emotional wordplay, trying to awake their feelings towards the hotel and their vacation through the restriction of 200 characters per comment. Titles such as “My winter wonderland”, “Happiest place on Earth”, “THE ONLY PLACE TO STAY WHEN IN ROVANIEMI” are thrown around in almost carefree manner, and comments ooze the same sort of high-spirited enthusiasm, for example one user commented “It's the most surreal place and I'm almost a believer now with all the Christmas magic I was exposed to!”.

That's it for the second assignment, was a lot of fun and a lot of work!

- JS