Heritage interpretation in the digital age : a new paradigm?

Abstract

This paper examines the ways heritage sites and tourists engage, hypothesizing about a necessary re-thinking of heritage interpretation for visitors that goes beyond interpretation as the transfer of information/significance/knowledge as didacticism grounded in learning theory, and moves towards an interpretation praxis that embraces an embodied experience and an experience where vision and visuality is privileged. Both these dimensions are at the forefront of the ways digital media are reconfiguring the relationship between heritage places and visitors and perhaps producing a new paradigm for heritage interpretation