Heritage Discourse in Digital Travel Video Diaries

Heritage Discourse in Digital Travel Video Diaries is devoted to multimodal and participatory meaning-making in a 2.0 digital environment, focused on the Basilicata region, in Southern Italy and, more specifically, on the selected 2019 European Culture Capital of Matera. With an overall aim to offer methodological indications on how to analyse similar online multimodal instances, the volume inspects a corpus of 18 video diaries uploaded on YouTube, over the years 2011-2013, by young and international web-artists. It seeks to explore how multimodally expressed genre hybridity in the diaries affects semiotic processes of heritage site image formation. Hence, it questions how text comments posted by YouTubers co-construct the meaning-making process, prompted by the video instances. Ultimately, it addresses how regional heritage (natural, cultural, human) is (re)conceptualized and (re)configured in such a polycentric and multidirectional communication situation, through digital technology.