Signs of heritage - an agent-based model of the dynamics of heritage categories

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 its categorising of local realities has become particularly widespread. However, the specific mechanism through which these transformations occur has remained unformalised in cultural heritage studies. This has lead to a lack of computational approaches to the issue of heritage categorization, which can articulate with other issues of tourism promotion and management. In this paper we conceptualise the cultural dynamics of heritage, such as the changes in categories used to signify heritage, designing and analysing a dedicated computational Agent-Based Model of heritage engagement. In it we seek to explore the role of communicative strategies, as they tie to social groups, as well as the specific topologies of interaction networks. With this, we seek to understand what role mediation, such as that produced by online platforms, can play in producing different levels of consensus between tourists. 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 undertaken. These results have implications for future directions of study of heritage and heritage modelling, placing emphasis on the need to analyse tourist communication contents, as well as being potentially useful for public policy on heritage management.