In the frame of the european project AthenaPlus[i], DEDALE[ii] is leading a thinking on Culural Heritage valorisation and mediation in urban space thanks to new mobile services and digital storytelling. Within a work package dedicated to “ Creative applications for the re-use of cultural resources“, the two partners PACKED and DEDALE have worked on an overview of existing tools and services for the development of creative applications for the (re)use of digital cultural heritage. We propose a paper to present this work of survey including academic approach, projects mapping and specific recommendations.

This paper will explore the opportunities of digital storytelling and geotagging for the valorization of DCH contents (such as Europeana) in the European cultural venues or in urban space. It will focus on concrete applications for education and tourism: mobile services for museum, enriched exhibitions, innovative tour of cultural heritage (castles, urban strolls, architecture, gardens, parks, city as a museum, city as a new learning environment…) and serious games.

Our contribution will present the implications of digital storytelling for cultural heritage with a key question: how user services and tools can change the relationship with the heritage object, redesigning heritage mediation. It will be a special focus on 3 main stakes:

1. Users involvement : Active users for a new vision of digital heritage: sensitive and collaborative

In the age of digital storytelling, many services (videos and photos sharing platforms, social networks) are based on the personalization of the user experience, engagement and participation by “User Generated Content”. In this context the main stake is to create tools for structuration and reuse of this important volume of data and metadata from users, sensitive and collaborative, giving a new vision of museum collection, digital heritage objects, art works…

2. Immersive and responsive devices for a complete user experience

Immersive audio and video guides (for tourism or museums), interactive maps (getting historic information out of a given place), transmedia web documentary (with a story adapted and declined on several medias) accompany users all along their visit experience with a lot of documents, resources and information. With digital storytelling the challenge is the contextualization and personalization of these data in order to present to the user digital content which makes sense for him/her in a given context.

 3. Mobile and generative storytelling devices for a real enriched visit space

The user does not have to click on his device to receive content – the device just “listens” to his behavior and translates in real time this pattern in a story stream. Being engaged and immerged with the geolocated content, the user can interact with the content of the story by changing and adjusting his/her trajectory and/or behavior. As users of mobile devices, we are familiar with getting content just by touching an interface (touchscreens). We begin to play with natural speech interfacing (Siri), but now we can also take the whole human body as input command for data retrieval, on the scale of the human body (meters, not pixels), within this natural context (the city, the visit space…) not the trackpad or the mouse).

The oral presentation of our paper will be based on visual and interactive documents: Animated presentation with pictures and videos.