Search Results (15)

The present study examines the role of ChatGPT as a travel advisor in influencing tourists’ decision-making in regard to destination visit intentions. Grounded in the Information Systems Success (ISS) model, this study explores three primary relationships: (1) the effect of information quality on users’ trust in ChatGPT’s travel recommendations, (2) the impact of trust in ChatGPT’s travel recommendations on destination visit intentions, and (3) the moderating role of destination images in the relationship between information quality and trust. This research employed a quantitative research design, collecting data from 528 Indonesian ChatGPT users. The findings show that information quality does not significantly shape users’ trust in ChatGPT’s travel advice, contradicting the classical ISS-Model prediction. In contrast, trust in ChatGPT’s travel recommendations exerts a significant positive effect on destination visit intentions, and the destination image fails to moderate the information–quality–trust link. This study provides practical guidance for Destination Management Organizations (DMOs), travel agencies, and policymakers seeking to optimize AI-driven tourism marketing by focusing on interactive storytelling and personalized engagement rather than solely focusing on information quality. Full article

Immersive technologies are increasingly acknowledged as powerful tools in sustainability education, capable of fostering deeper engagement and emotional resonance. This study investigates the potential of 360° VR storytelling to enhance learning through embodied knowledge, attitudinal change, and emotional awareness. Conducted within the EMOTIONAL project, the research explores a first-person narrative told from the perspective of a ceramic object rooted in Italian cultural heritage, designed to facilitate meaningful, affective learning. The present study addresses the following research questions: RQ1 Can 360° VR story-living narrations effectively promote embodied learning and semantic and attitudinal shifts in the context of sustainability education? RQ2 What added insights can be gained from integrating subjective assessments with physiological measures? To this end, a hybrid assessment framework was developed and validated, combining subjective self-report tools (including attitudinal scales, semantic differential analysis, and engagement metrics) with objective physiological measures, specifically Electrodermal Activity (EDA). Sixty participants, including students and entrepreneurs, experienced the immersive narrative, and a subset underwent physiological tracking to evaluate the effectiveness of the experience. The findings show that immersive storytelling can enhance emotional and cognitive engagement, producing shifts in semantic interpretation, self-perceived knowledge, and attitudes toward material culture. A convergence of high emotional engagement, embodied learning, and technology acceptance was observed, although individual differences emerged based on prior experience and disciplinary background. EDA data offered complementary insights, identifying specific moments of heightened arousal during the narrative. The study demonstrates that emotionally driven immersive narratives (supported by integrated assessment methods) can make abstract sustainability values more tangible and personally resonant, thereby fostering more reflective and relational approaches to sustainable consumption and production. Full article

The narrative structure of animated films plays a critical role in shaping audience perception, yet quantitative investigations into how character interaction networks influence film ratings remain limited. To address this gap, we apply complex network theory to analyze 82 animated films, extracting character networks from narrative interactions and examining key topological features—including centrality heterogeneity, protagonist relative centrality, network density, clustering coefficient, average shortest path length, and semantic diversity of relationships. Our findings demonstrate that higher-rated films are characterized by greater disparities in character centrality, lower network density and efficiency, longer average shortest path lengths, and richer semantic diversity. These structural patterns suggest that loosely connected yet hierarchically organized character networks enhance narrative complexity and audience engagement. The proposed framework offers a quantitative, data-driven approach to narrative design and provides a theoretical foundation for analyzing storytelling structures across diverse media, including novels, television series, and comics. Full article

This study examines the role of cultural heritage sites as facilitators of place making within the evolving paradigm of smart city development. As cities worldwide adopt data-driven models of governance, integrating cultural identity and heritage becomes increasingly critical. This research addresses the conceptual and practical gap in understanding how heritage can support inclusive, sustainable, and meaningful urban transformation in smart city contexts. To do so, it selects Geelong in Australia as a case study. The study then employs a qualitative methodology drawing on semi-structured interviews with experts and professionals across urban planning, architecture, sustainability, and heritage management. Thematic analysis derived five key themes: heritage as an identity anchor, digital technologies enhancing cultural narratives, community engagement, adaptive reuse, and economic-policy integration. Findings highlight that heritage sites are dynamic assets that foster community identity, historical continuity, and digital storytelling. Digital tools enhance the visibility and accessibility of heritage, while adaptive reuse strategies align cultural preservation with environmental sustainability and economic growth. The resulting conceptual and assessment framework positions heritage both as a cultural and functional urban asset, offering actionable insights for planners, policymakers, and designers aiming to create smart cities that are not only technologically advanced but also socially inclusive and culturally grounded. Full article

Technology-enhanced learning environments are increasingly designed to promote not only knowledge acquisition but also affective and behavioral changes. This study explored how digital game-based learning (DGBL), combined with the Stage Model of Self-Regulated Behavioral Change (SSBC), can support such transformation. Focusing on environmental literacy as a target domain, fifty sixth-grade students were assigned to either a DGBL group or a web-based learning group in a quasi-experimental design. Quantitative data were collected using literacy scales measuring knowledge, sensitivity, and attitude, while qualitative insights were gathered via interviews. Our results showed that while both groups improved in terms of environmental knowledge, the DGBL group demonstrated significantly greater gains in attitudes. The interview findings revealed that the interactive storytelling and role-playing in the game promoted emotional engagement and self-reflection, aligning with the SSBC’s predecision stage. These results highlight the potential of theory-driven digital games to foster deeper cognitive–affective learning and pro-environmental behaviors among young learners. Full article

The digital age, driven by advancements in data processing and internet technologies, has seen virtual social networks, particularly Instagram, become integral to daily life, influencing both leisure and professional activities. Instagram, with over two billion users in 2023, emphasizes visual storytelling, making it a pivotal platform for media outlets to engage audiences through photos and videos. This study quantitatively analyses the Instagram engagement and content strategies of five prominent legacy news outlets from the United States and the United Kingdom—The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today, The Independent, and The Washington Post. Through an examination of over 9000 posts from January to December 2023, this research evaluates posting frequency, user engagement (likes and comments), hashtag usage, profile mentions, and geographic coverage. Findings indicate significant differences in posting strategies and engagement levels, highlighting The Washington Post’s intensive posting and The Guardian’s selective engagement strategy. This study emphasizes tailored strategies, thematic consistency, and careful use of mentions and hashtags as crucial for maximizing audience interaction. Full article

This study analyses social media networks in tourism using graphs focusing on user influence, hashtag patterns, and engagement. This study aims to reveal the structural function of core users, development of hashtags, and interaction patterns that construct tourism discourses. Using NodeXL 2024 for social network visualization and clustering analysis, this study measures centrality, modularity, and geodesic distances for influential user detection, topical dissemination, and engagement pattern identification. The results uncover bridging nodes between different communities, the proliferation of thematic hashtags related to sustainability and cultural heritage, and the role of emotional and visual storytelling in the use of engagement patterns. The theoretical implications also progress SNA application in tourism studies by illuminating aspects of how online discourses coalesce and the effect of SNA on access. In practical terms, this study indicates that destination marketers must consider leveraging key influencers, using strategic types of hashtags, and by monitoring engagement at key times to maximize effective destination marketing and to enhance crisis communication. These contributions notwithstanding, limitations involve the omission of sentiment analysis and the necessity for longitudinal data. By exploring new emerging platforms like TikTok and Instagram, researchers can begin to understand the more relevant trends of digital engagement. The present research offers a data-driven approach for facilitating the significance of integrating social media strategies with network externalities for tourism operators. Full article

This study proposes the Tourism Adaptable Digital Marketing Framework (TADMF), a flexible, cyclical model tailored to optimize digital marketing strategies for hotels and destinations. By leveraging data-driven insights and neuromarketing principles, the framework addresses critical gaps in traditional linear models to maximize bookings for hotels and enhance awareness of destinations. The three-stage cyclical process, attraction, engagement, and conversion, ensures continuous feedback and refinement across the customer journey. Hotels benefit from tailored techniques, such as dynamic pricing and personalized recommendations, while destinations focus on storytelling and user-generated content to forge emotional connections. Compared to traditional marketing models, this framework uniquely integrates online and offline interactions to create cohesive customer experiences. Key findings reveal that the TADMF fosters a dynamic interplay between theoretical innovation and practical applicability, demonstrating scalability and adaptability to diverse tourism contexts. The study concludes that the TADMF offers a robust foundation for addressing the evolving challenges of digital marketing in tourism, paving the way for future research into advanced technologies such as AR, VR, and AI. Full article

Knowledge communication in cultural heritage and digital humanities currently faces two challenges, which this paper addresses: On the one hand, data-driven storytelling in these fields has mainly focused on human protagonists, while other essential entities (such as artworks and artifacts, institutions, or places) have been neglected. On the other hand, storytelling tools rarely support the larger chains of data practices, which are required to generate and shape the data and visualizations needed for such stories. This paper introduces the InTaVia platform, which has been developed to bridge these gaps. It supports the practices of data retrieval, creation, curation, analysis, and communication with coherent visualization support for multiple types of entities. We illustrate the added value of this open platform for storytelling with four case studies, focusing on (a) the life of Albrecht Dürer (person biography), (b) the Saliera salt cellar by Benvenuto Cellini (object biography), (c) the artist community of Lake Tuusula (group biography), and (d) the history of the Hofburg building complex in Vienna (place biography). Numerous suggestions for future research arise from this undertaking. Full article

Data-driven stories (DDS) are digital forms of storytelling that arrange data and visualizations to communicate a narrative of information to an audience. They have been growing rapidly over the past decades. As a result, a great degree of versatility appears in the forms of published DDS. The recent structures of DDS are more complex, respecting their arrangement, composition, features, and inner parts. In the current academic research, neither storytelling techniques nor any taxonomies suggest visual mechanisms to distinguish between different layouts, compositions, and arrangements. The lack of an expressive visual solution that integrates different parts of DDS under one structure prevents the authors from trying more alternative design paths in the story design process. In this proposed work, we unify all the constructing parts of DDS to define the narrative structure as a visually structured representation of the DDS narrative, which is formed and designed by their constructing elements. This solution proposes a design language consisting of a set of design rules that integrate the visual elements to represent the DDS narrative structure. Our evaluation of the audit process out of 100 DDS examples confirms that the design language is comprehensive, expressive, and versatile. Additionally, we developed DataStoryDesign, a system that incorporates this visual solution to facilitate prototyping and storyboarding DDS for a team of DDS authors. The preliminary result of the exploratory evaluation indicates that such a solution is effective in prototyping and storyboarding DDS. In addition, our findings confirmed that the existence of our design language improves the visual communication between different personas in the DDS production workflow. Full article

Enhancing data-driven decision-making is vital for waste authorities. Although few studies have explored the influence of socio-economic indicators on waste tonnage, comprehensive analysis of urban waste data focusing on geographical information is also scarce. There is a dearth of dashboards for visualizing waste tonnage with spatial relationship maps. This study aims to present a prediction model useful for estimating urban waste by using personal income (I), the number of income earners (E), land values (L), the estimated resident population (P) and population density (D), called the IELPD measures. An innovative approach is developed to identify the correlation between urban household waste data and socio-economic factors and develop an advanced dashboard based on a geographic information system (GIS). To accomplish this, relationship maps and regression analysis are deployed to visualize household waste data spanning six years of waste production in New South Wales, Australia, classified into three categories: recyclable, residual and organic (RRO) wastes. Furthermore, this classification enables accessing the association between these three waste categories and the IELPD metrics. And there are four types of visualization generated, that is, thematic mapping, spatial relationship maps, correlation matrices and dashboard development. The regression analysis shows a substantial association between RRO waste tonnage, population changes and a minor correlation with land values. Overall, this study contributes to urban waste data storytelling and its spatiotemporal associations with socio-economic determinants. This paper offers a valuable prediction model of the IELPD metrics to estimate urban waste and visualize them in a dashboard allowing practitioners and decision-makers to track trends in the RRO waste stream in urban waste generally. Full article

The current paper focuses on the development of an enhanced Mobile Journalism (MoJo) model for soundscape heritage crowdsourcing, data-driven storytelling, and management in the era of big data and the semantic web. Soundscapes and environmental sound semantics have a great impact on cultural heritage, also affecting the quality of human life, from multiple perspectives. In this view, context- and location-aware mobile services can be combined with state-of-the-art machine and deep learning approaches to offer multilevel semantic analysis monitoring of sound-related heritage. The targeted utilities can offer new insights toward sustainable growth of both urban and rural areas. Much emphasis is also put on the multimodal preservation and auralization of special soundscape areas and open ancient theaters with remarkable acoustic behavior, representing important cultural artifacts. For this purpose, a pervasive computing architecture is deployed and investigated, utilizing both client- and cloud-wise semantic analysis services, to implement and evaluate the envisioned MoJo methodology. Elaborating on previous/baseline MoJo tools, research hypotheses and questions are stated and put to test as part of the human-centered application design and development process. In this setting, primary algorithmic backend services on sound semantics are implemented and thoroughly validated, providing a convincing proof of concept of the proposed model. Full article

This paper casts light on cultural heritage storytelling in the context of interactive documentary, a hybrid media genre that employs a full range of multimedia tools to document reality, provide sustainability of the production and successful engagement of the audience. The main research hypotheses are enclosed in the statements: (a) the interactive documentary is considered a valuable tool for the sustainability of cultural heritage and (b) digital approaches to documentary storytelling can provide a sustainable form of viewing during the years. Using the Greek interactive documentary (i-doc) NEW LIFE (2013) as a case study, the users’ engagement is evaluated by analyzing items from a seven-year database of web metrics. Specifically, we explore the adopted ways of the interactive documentary users to engage with the storytelling, the depth to which they were involved along with the most popular sections/traffic sources and finally, the differences between the first launch period and latest years were investigated. We concluded that interactivity affordances of this genre enhance the social dimension of cultural, while the key factors for sustainability are mainly (a) constant promotion with transmedia approach; (b) data-driven evaluation and reform; and (c) a good story that gathers relevant niches, with specific interest to the story. Full article

The continuous evolution of modern software technologies combined with the deluge of available “ready-to-use” data has triggered revolutionary breakthroughs in several domains, preservation of cultural heritage included. This breakthrough is more than obvious just by considering the numerous multimedia tools and frameworks that actually serve as a means of providing enhanced cultural storytelling experiences (e.g., navigation in historical sites using VR, 3D modeling of artifacts, or even holograms), which are now readily available. In this context and inspired by the vital importance of sustainability as a concept that expresses the need to create the necessary conditions for future generations to use and evolve present artifacts, we target the software engineering domain and propose a systematic way towards measuring the extent to which a software artifact developed and applied in the cultural heritage domain is sustainable. To that end, we present a data-driven methodology that harnesses data residing in online software repositories and involves the analysis of various open-source multimedia tools and frameworks. Full article

Storytelling is recognized as a valid and important method of communicating information and knowledge gleaned from volumes of ever-accumulating data. Practices of data-driven storytelling in journalism and geovisual analytics have contributed to the development of geovisual stories; also called story maps. The benefits of student-focused multi-thematic atlases and digital storytelling methods in education can also be realized in story maps. An online, interactive version of the original paper version of the Wyoming Student Atlas was developed using story mapping technology. Studies on best practices for data-driven storytelling and web map interaction were used to inform the transition of the atlas from a traditional paper format to a collection of story maps. Evaluation of the atlas story maps for educational purposes was conducted by observing students from multiple classrooms as they used the story maps in a lesson. The students and educators responded to a survey after using the story maps. Results of the survey show positive responses to the atlas story maps, including ease of use and preference over a traditional paper atlas. However, certain types of interaction with the map resulted in increased negative or uncertain responses from students concerning their perception of the atlas story maps. Full article