One place, many stories digital storytelling for cultural heritage discovery in the landscape

Places we walk through every day often have cultural heritage stories connected to them, but many stories remain unknown and many get lost. Storytelling for cultural heritage discovery has long been used, mostly in cultural institutions. The documentation and dissemination of cultural heritage stories related to the landscape is challenging. There are countless places, and many of them lie outside the responsibility of cultural institutions. Associations and enthusiasts contribute to gather memories and tell about places, but the information is often fragmented and not always available in a digital form. Thus stories are difficult to retrieve. Can we exploit the popularity of a mobile participatory culture in order to engage people to tell about the places around them and to boost the exploration of cultural heritage in the landscape? This paper presents the design and evaluation of the mobile and social storytelling application “stedr”. As young people are under-represented among users of traditional culture, we have chosen them as a target group in our study. Young people have contributed to elicitation of requirements, to the development of the application, and finally to its evaluation. Our contribution is a revisited digital storytelling approach for engaging in the discovery of cultural heritage in the landscape and the evaluation of the approach.