Communication Features Facilitating Appreciation of Cultural Heritage Values for IDN

Abstract

Cultural heritage values are defined as a set of characteristics perceived in heritage by certain individuals or groups. Cultural heritage values highlight the motivations for the conservation of heritage properties by national and international organizations. These include value associations selected by experts and communities. Heritage values of communities are passed down over generations and help in conservation. Historic and traditional (pre-digital) narratives communicated values but not all sources were credible. Current efforts using digital technologies for the communication of cultural heritage disproportionately focuses on engagement and spectacularization. This has had a negative effect on research towards the sharing of cultural heritage values through Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN). We believe that a number of communication features can be beneficial to value appreciation especially when using IDN. In this paper, we discuss values included by the designer(s) and also appreciated by the user(s) of IDN in the communication of cultural heritage. We address four types of features that are suggested as being influential for the communication of cultural heritage values, namely 1) narrative significance, 2) multiperspectivity, 3) dialogue facilitation, 4) contextualization. We go through six case studies and show how to exploit these IDN features to effectively communicate the associated values of cultural heritage to a larger audience.