RESEARCH | MULTILAYERED STORYTELLING FOR DIGITAL HERITAGE
Type Digital Heritage Storytelling, Critical Heritage Studies, Multilayered Narratives Team Daoxin Chen Time November 2024 - December 2024
This research explores heritage storytelling through interactive media and extended reality, with the aim of offering guidance for promoting multilayered narratives within the fields of Digital Cultural Heritage and Heritage Experience Design.
Through a comprehensive literature review and the analysis of three case studies, the research examines how diverse perspectives—from local communities to tourists—are represented in heritage interpretation. These cases provide valuable insights into the development of a new platform designed to support and enhance multilayered cultural heritage narratives. Building on these findings, a conceptual proposal for the platform is introduced, accompanied by a set of key questions for future investigation.
CONTEXT & QUESTIONS
Critical Heritage Studies, as proposed by Laurajane Smith, advocate for alternative heritage discourses, the integration of tangible and intangible heritage, and the cultivation of emotional connections between people and heritage. These concepts have recently inspired innovative approaches to using digital media for heritage storytelling. This review will summarize and examine research grounded in the principles of Critical Heritage Studies to explore how these ideas have been incorporated into the design and application of interactive technologies for cultural heritage.
CASE STUDIES
CASE ONE
The research project about the Theodosian Land Walls of Istanbul explores how different communities engage with, interpret, and assign meaning to the heritage site. Recognizing that official heritage narratives often exclude marginalized voices, the project aimed to co-produce alternative, community-driven narratives of this iconic site.
The team engaged local participants through “cultural probes”, namely creative, speculative activities that generated rich personal narratives. These formed the basis for a co-produced films that feature local perspectives and memories, and an app, “Plural Heritages,” which embeds these narratives into GPS-based walking tours of the heritage site.
The project rethinks heritage preservation by promoting bottom-up, pluralistic storytelling, using digital tools to connect history, place, and identity. It also contributes to Critical Heritage Studies and HCI scholarship through open-access digital tools.
The Structure of the Case One
CASE TWO
This research about community heritage explores how principles from Critical Heritage Studies can be embedded into the design of interactive exhibitions. The authors present the design, implementation, and evaluation of an interactive exhibition which was created in collaboration with cultural heritage professionals and the community.
Rather than presenting a single, authoritative historical narrative, the design introduces multiple perspectives—including those of historians, citizens, and imagined voices—to challenge traditional top-down heritage representations. Visitors interact with a touch-based interface that allows them to explore different storylines related to the heritage site, each offering a unique interpretation of historical events and figures.
The research emphasizes co-design practices with heritage stakeholders and iterative prototyping to align the experience with critical heritage values. The findings suggest that interactive technologies can make room for emotionally resonant interpretations of the past, encouraging reflection and dialogue among museum visitors.
Ultimately, the paper advocates for a "Critical Heritage Design" approach—one that integrates critical theory, participatory methods, and interaction design to reshape how cultural heritage is experienced and understood.
The Structure of the Case Two
CASE THREE
This research explores how digital text-to-image tools can be used to co-create and exhibit personal, emotionally resonant narratives about cultural heritage. To emphasize the intangible aspects of cultural heritage, like personal memory and community meaning, they developed a co-creation process using text-to-image AI tools (e.g., Midjourney) that enabled 15 participants to visually express imagined threats to culturally significant sites.
Participants iteratively refined AI-generated images, expressing concerns such as over-tourism, climate change, and commercialization. These visuals often led to deeper reflection, personal storytelling, and even novel ideas for heritage preservation. The exhibition of these images was designed to bridge personal and public engagement with cultural heritage, highlighting how the tools can shift heritage storytelling toward a more participatory, emotionally connected, and speculative future-oriented model.
The Structure of the Case Three
SUMMARY
A unifying theme across the three case studies that integrate Critical Heritage Studies with digital media storytelling is the emphasis on co-creation. Each project actively engages a wide range of participants—including visitors, local communities, travelers, and volunteers—in both the collection of heritage narratives and the design of heritage experiences. This participatory approach ensures that the resulting interpretations of heritage sites are diverse, inclusive, and reflective of multiple perspectives. Moreover, all three studies place significant focus on the intangible dimensions of cultural heritage. Through various digital formats such as interactive experiences, films, and mobile applications, these projects aim to uncover and communicate the personal memories and emotional connections that heritage sites evoke—ultimately enriching public engagement and fostering a deeper connection to cultural heritage.
The Summary of the Three Research
CONCLUSION & NEXT STEP
Further Question to Explore
The Purposes of the Platform
These studies point toward a growing trend in which the principles of Critical Heritage Studies are being gradually integrated into the fields of digital heritage and heritage storytelling. All three projects effectively leverage a range of multimedia tools—including film, interactive installations, and AI technologies—to enhance the representation of diverse and intangible aspects of cultural heritage.
Building on the insights from this prior research, a new project proposal is put forward to explore how the core ideas of Critical Heritage Studies—particularly the emphasis on plural interpretations and intangible heritage—can be incorporated into heritage experiences using extended reality (XR). The goal is to facilitate the dissemination of diverse heritage narratives through immersive and interactive experiences.
This proposed XR cultural platform aims to investigate key questions: How can design and narrative theory inform the creation of multilayered heritage experiences in XR? And how can such experiences foster personal and emotional connections between visitors and culturally significant places? By enabling multimodal and spatial storytelling, the platform aspires to amplify underrepresented heritage narratives while deepening visitors' engagement through emotionally resonant and personalized interactions with heritage sites.
REFERENCE
Caroline Claisse, Daniela Petrelli, Luigina Ciolfi, Nick Dulake, Mark T. Marshall, and Abigail C. Durrant. 2020. Crafting Critical Heritage Discourses into Interactive Exhibition Design. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376689
Kexue Fu, Ruishan Wu, Yuying Tang, Yixin Chen, Bowen Liu, and RAY LC. 2024. "Being Eroded, Piece by Piece": Enhancing Engagement and Storytelling in Cultural Heritage Dissemination by Exhibiting GenAI Co-Creation Artifacts. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2833–2850. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660711
Tom Schofield. Plural Heritages of Istanbul
Tom Schofield, Daniel Foster Smith, Gönül Bozoglu, and Christopher Whitehead. 2019. Design and Plural Heritages: Composing Critical Futures. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 6, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300236
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