A collection of narrative practices on cultural heritage with innovative technologies and creative strategies

Abstract

[Abstract] The H2020 project rurAllure, “Promotion of rural museums and heritage sites in the vicinity of European pilgrimage routes” (2021-2023) aims to enrich pilgrims’ experiences with the creation of meaningful cultural products focused on the lesser-known heritage sites of rural areas that are not found on pilgrimage routes, but in their surroundings. One of the project goals is to create contents and narratives to be offered to pilgrims over successive days with the integration of state-of-the-art technology. This way, hidden rural heritage will be discoverable and pilgrims will have the opportunity to actively engage with rural places nearby, their local communities, identity, and culture. The latter will no longer be passive witnesses, but active participants in transnational networks of shared history and living heritage.

The rurAllure project aims to develop a new concept of mobile guide for pilgrims that will present rural heritage sites and activities of interest along with information of transportation and accommodation to help movement from and back to pilgrimage routes, as well as cohesive narratives to be consumed along the way, focused on four pilots: literary heritage on the ways to Santiago de Compostela, thermal heritage and others on the ways to Rome, ethnographic heritage on the ways to Trondheim, and natural heritage on the ways to Csíksomlyó.

To facilitate the pilots’ brainstorming in the creation of multimedia contents, we developed a review of narrative models on cultural heritage storytelling. In this paper, we present the results, a collection of 22 case studies we analyzed with a common structure, from which six distinctive groups of narrative practices emerge: sound-walks, wearable guides, context-aware games, simulations, digital exhibitions, and cultural wayfinding. All cases studies disrupt traditional notions of storytelling consumption and foster new relationships between people and places of interest that may lead to advancements in the pilgrimage context.

The present review provides a collection of best practices and actions that utilize the latest digital technologies and innovative strategies for producing meaningful narratives, mainly about cultural heritage sites. All of them are focused on the active engagement of users with particular locations of interest, landmarks, structures, objects, or intangible expressions. By doing so, their creators try to enhance tourists’ experiences while they explore or travel to places with cultural, natural, or historical significance.

This state-of-the-art collection was developed within the H2020 project rurAllure, “Promotion of rural museums and heritage sites in the vicinity of European pilgrimage routes” (2021-2023). The project is focused on attracting en-route pilgrims to hidden or lesser-known rural museums and heritage sites located near four European pilgrimage routes: Santiago de Compostela, Rome, Trondheim, and Csíksomlyó. With this collection, our aim is to develop the project in the creation of multimedia contents and multimodal narratives for people that make their way to these pilgrimage destinations based on an initial, precise approach to the latest actions in the field.