Authenticity

“The most thoughtful work on authenticity since Miles Orvell’s classic, The Real Thing. Orvell’s domain was objects, while Cortada and Aspray’s is time, place, people, and acts as they creatively and expertly analyze inauthenticity and misinformation in heritage tourism—offering rich intellectual journeys through Colonial Williamsburg, Gettysburg, and Lindsborg, Kansas.”

-- Jeffrey Yost, author of Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry

“I admire and appreciate this unique book on many levels. In a deft interdisciplinary stroke, the fields of Tourism/Leisure Studies and Information Studies are taken from a state of curious flirtation to a real partnership. Aspray and Cortada enact this feat by focusing analytical attention on heritage tourism sites and by exploring a single concept – authenticity – from dual perspectives. In addition to expert, systematic reviews of the literatures on the topics from both sides, three case studies trace (with an eye to authenticity) how heritage sites come into being. The detailed and sometimes surprising historical accounts establish grounds to understand and problematize the nature of authenticity in fresh ways. I believe that readers of this book (myself included) who visit heritage sites hereafter may not be so easily carried back in time. But on the bright side, we will more mindfully experience their aspirations, tensions, and complexities as socially-constructed environments and as ‘information ecosystems.’ In a quiet but important methodological triumph, Aspray and Cortada may have produced the long-lost blueprint for Jesse Shera’s vision for information studies—social epistemology.”

-- Jenna Hartel, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Information Science at University of Toronto

"Authenticity marries information studies with tourism studies to provide much needed context to our understanding of the world of misinformation. Through case studies of famous cultural heritage sites, readers get a glimpse into the historical, cultural, emotional, and political dimensions that shape these sites and their implicit and explicit misinformation production, which in turn shape the way we view the United States and its corresponding cultures. An intriguing and necessary book."

-- Nicole Cooke, Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and Associate Professor, School of Information Science, University of South Carolina

Using tourism and heritage as a vehicle, the authors map the intellectual space between authenticity and reimagination to raise fundamental questions about misinformation and the ways it has been and should be studied.

-- Andrew Dillon, Daniel Professor of Information, University of Texas at Austin

Aspray and Cortada’s Authenticity is a very evocative and compelling book that breaks much new theoretical and narrative ground. It will be useful to historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and information and cultural studies scholars for years and decades to come.

* Bits and Bytes Newslett