Historical Advertisements of Hotels, Tour Agencies and Involved Services of Tourism Industry in Greece: A Data Mining Analysis via Image Processing

This article examines the development of printed hotel and agency advertisements in Greece. The aim of this study is, firstly, to record the key points in which the visibility and promotion of hotels and agencies is focused; secondly, to map out their shifts in time; and, third, to link the observable (textual and visual elements of point of view) with the historical context in which they are referred in order to relate the projected material and reality. The theoretical framework (i.e., logging) moves on one hand to that of “polygraphism”, as expressed by the complex reading of image and text and, on the other, to that of “visual sociology”. The empirical material of the study consists of 117 hotel advertisements, covering the period from 1883 to 2019, as well as 59 agency advertisements covering the period from 1907 to 2019. The collected data are analyzed and transformed to assume suitable form for the execution of the respective machine-learning algorithms provided by the Google Vision API that detect objects and faces, read printed and handwritten text and build valuable metadata. To conclude, the combination of hotel and agency advertisements is intended to give to this study the sense of “market,” in which different forms of service interweave to reveal the breadth of an “industry”.