Abstract
In recent times, heritage has become a key focus of socio-economic concern due to its connections to history, nationalism, and, especially, tourism. It has been highlighted as having major consequences for the sociocultural engagement of local populations. The notion that tourism transforms local heritage through the categorization of local realities has become particularly widespread. However, the specific mechanism through which these transformations occur has remained unformalized in cultural heritage studies. This has resulted in a lack of computational approaches to the issue of heritage categorization, which can connect with other issues of tourism promotion and management. In this article, we conceptualize the cultural dynamics of heritage, such as changes in the categories used to signify heritage, and design and analyze a dedicated computational agent-based model of heritage engagement. Here, we seek to explore the role of communicative strategies, as they relate to social groups, as well as the specific topologies of interaction networks. We attempt to understand what role mediation, such as that produced by online platforms, can play in producing different levels of consensus between tourists. The results suggest that topology plays the greatest role in generating consensus in the evolution of heritage meaning, with different patterns emerging according to the communicative strategies employed. The results have implications for the future direction of the study of heritage and heritage modeling, placing emphasis on the need to analyze tourist communication content, as well as being potentially useful for public policy with regard to heritage management.
Highlights
It is an often asserted that cultural heritage is the product of its time, its people and their concerns [1]–[6], and that, owing to that, it is a site of contestation and constant redefinition [4], [7], [8]
This means that elements, physical entities in the real world such as a church or a door, can be considered heritage to different individuals, through different ways: when we look at a church we can see in it a prime example of National History – the lines it traces, the windows, the light – as much as we can see in it a marker of the Local Community’s experiences
This paper centres on two baseline questions that relate to this discussion: i) How can we formally represent the dynamics of heritage as a process of tourism shaping local opinions?
Summary
It is an often asserted that cultural heritage is the product of its time, its people and their concerns [1]–[6], and that, owing to that, it is a site of contestation and constant redefinition [4], [7], [8]. It is accepted that heritage is first and foremost the product of individuals, groups and their social conceptions, and only later institutionalised and legitimised This means that elements, physical entities in the real world such as a church or a door, can be considered heritage to different individuals, through different ways: when we look at a church we can see in it a prime example of National History – the lines it traces, the windows, the light – as much as we can see in it a marker of the Local Community’s experiences. The work presented here serves as a first attempt at tackling the issue of how the categories associated with heritage change within a local population over time with the process of successive interpretations and successive actions of tourists, through a dedicated agent-based model It does so from a social scientific point of view, with the goal of providing a computational tool to reason about these phenomena. We bring back the discussion of how we can understand heritage dynamics, the limitations of the model and analysis, as well as further lines of research
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