Cultural Heritage, Transmedia Narrative and a Sense of Place

Cultural heritage promotion on the web has become a current, effective and evolving social practice that fully employs new media for a variety of communicative goals. The search for feedback, the improvement of visitor experience and the leveraging of information resources are carried out through a number of multimodal genres (from blogs and e-newsletters to geolocative devices) on dedicated websites and the social web, and, most recently, through mobile apps for smartphones and tablets. The interconnectedness of the web and mobile platforms that offer different options of approach and engagement generates a narrative flow from one format to another in order to adapt widelydistributed information to a variety of media, genres and contexts of use. This paper investigates the role of storytelling in online heritage promotion in the light of the widespread use of social media and the consequent production of transmedia narratives that tell multiple stories over different platforms and together form one big pervasive story. First introduced on the homepage, specific information and descriptions of historic sites are then adapted to the detailed, atomised and userfriendly illustration provided by a number of text types that, while related to each other content-wise, are at the same time disseminated throughout the web – embedded in the heritage portal itself and accessible on the networked social media, or downloadable in apps on demand that require mobile-ready content. By means of a creative combination of storytelling, visualisation strategies and usability criteria, it so happens that historic sites are described in specific place narratives, but also remediated into virtual tours and photo galleries and promoted via social media. Taking a few examples from popular heritage websites in Great Britain and deploying a narrative analytic approach together with insights from pragmatics, this paper investigates to what extent storytelling is affecting the relationship between the narrating self and the narrated world, co-constructing a new ‘sense of place’.