Signs of Heritage—An Agent-Based Model of the Dynamics of Heritage Categories

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 the categorization of local realities has become particularly widespread. However, the specific mechanism through which these transformations occur has remained unformalized in cultural heritage studies. This has resulted in a lack of computational approaches to the issue of heritage categorization, which can connect with other issues of tourism promotion and management. In this article, we conceptualize the cultural dynamics of heritage, such as changes in the categories used to signify heritage, and design and analyze a dedicated computational agent-based model of heritage engagement. Here, we seek to explore the role of communicative strategies, as they relate to social groups, as well as the specific topologies of interaction networks. We attempt to understand what role mediation, such as that produced by online platforms, can play in producing different levels of consensus between tourists. The 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 employed. The results have implications for the future direction of the study of heritage and heritage modeling, placing emphasis on the need to analyze tourist communication content, as well as being potentially useful for public policy with regard to heritage management.