"Talking pictures": digital storytelling and performance in Heritage communication.

The article investigates digital storytelling in the context of Heritage communication. Heritage refers to historical sites and museums and to how people build identities and discourse around objects and places. Narration in the form of storytelling construes Heritage values in communities, facilitates access to the arts and preserves the material ‘signs’ of culture. Digital communication ‘augments’ the symbolic, aesthetic and social aspects of Heritage and reveals the deep affective value of narration. Storytelling combines oral narrative (mode) in the form of a script (genre) but uses a variety of media (blog, web page, social networks) to create meaning. Emotive language represents a key element in the construction of individual and collective identity. The discursive aspects involved in storytelling are illustrated by the work of Daniel Meadows (born 1952), an English photographer and participatory media specialist who pioneered digital storytelling techniques in Britain. Meadows’ work was influenced by Ivan Illich’s ideas as presented in Tools for Conviviality (1975) and the activity of the Center for Digital Storytelling at the University of California, Berkeley. In this perspective, he produced fictional stories that focused on the participants’ creativity, dramatizing traditions and life-stories. Digital stories place fragments of life in a wider world context and re-enact the vision and point of view on History of the subjects involved. The success of the genre is inherent in the format that suits contemporary mediated narratives even if it originated in the radical countercultures of the ‘70s. The article shows how the digital performs the notion of Heritage and suggests that visual culture, Heritage and narration are an area of intertextual enquiry that deserves more investigation.