It is always interesting to find so-called taxonomies of interesting and unusual topics. Even if they aren’t true taxonomies, they are typically classifications of some form or another and they provide information, which is after all, the goal. Foxxfur recently published The Theme Park Trope List, a first attempt to summarize the narrative gimmicks used in theme park attractions. This humorous but interesting topic came from Boing Boing in their article, “Taxonomy of theme park narrative gimmicks.”
Theme parks have been around for 60+ years now, but the entertainment park experience goes all the way back to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and infamous parks like Coney Island. There’s a whole history of rhetorical devices, narrative conceits, motifs, and cliches that theme park attractions draw on to communicate with us strongly and basically visually. These are called tropes, and are the focus of this classification.
There is value in classification. True taxonomies can help manage big data by providing a solid standards-based taxonomy to index against. The results are comprehensive and consistent search results. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies because of consistency.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
