From fiction to UGC: Intermedial production of nostalgia in urbanising China through multimodal embedding

Abstract

Media-driven destination making and the reconstruction of locality have become important topics in intermedial research. However, systematically tracing such intermedial transformations, especially in quantitative terms, has long remained methodologically challenging. This study projects heterogeneous media into a shared semantic space through multimodal embedding, establishing a structured and comparable analytical context for examining the relations between narrative content and representational forms across media. The analysis draws on more than 27,000 multi-source samples, including extensive social media-derived user-generated content (UGC). The White Deer Plain storyworld in China is selected as a representative case, showing a systematic shift, centred on nostalgia, from narrative construction, through visualisation, to cultural commodification. This selective process shows that space actively reworks existing symbolic meanings by reorganising hotspots, visual salience, and experiential sequences. At a broader level, this symbolic reconfiguration signals a shift in place identity, through which the rural fringe is increasingly incorporated into broader regional restructuring and a city-centred development logic. The study contributes to elucidating how intermedial transformation and spatial mediality shape the production of locality while offering empirical insights into destination image-making in contemporary spatial development.