Heritage Discourse in Digital Travel Video Diaries

Sabrina Francesconi

Heritage Discourse in Digital Travel Video Diaries is devoted to the analysis of multimodal and participatory meaning-making in a 2.0 digital environment, focused on the Basilicata region, in Southern Italy. It specifically addresses a corpus of 18 video diaries uploaded on YouTube, over the years 2011-2013, by young and international web-artists. With an overall aim to offer methodological indications on how to analyse similar online multimodal instances, the volume examines visual-verbal inter-semiosis as performing innovative generic configurations in travel-tourist literature. It seeks to explore how multimodal genre hybridity in the travel 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.