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The role of cultural heritage in visitor narratives of peatlands: analysis of online user-generated reviews from three peatland sites in England
Flint, Abbi Jennings, Benjamin R.
Flint, Abbi
Jennings, Benjamin R.
Publication Date
2021-06
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© 2021 The Authors. Published by Informa UK Limited. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.
0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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openAccess
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2021-06-06
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Abstract
User-generated reviews of visitor attractions, on publicly available websites,
such as Tripadvisor, are frequently used in tourism research but
feature less often in published cultural heritage research. In this paper,
we describe a qualitative analysis of the text from user-generated reviews
of three peatland heritage landscapes in the United Kingdom – Ilkley
Moor, Thorne and Hatfield Moors, and Shapwick Heath – to better understand
the role tangible and intangible cultural heritage play in visitor
perceptions and narratives of these sites. Our analysis indicates that
visitors tend to emphasise natural over cultural heritage of peatland
landscapes and hold plural, highly contextual and sometimes dissonant
perceptions; there is no single story of peatlands. This presents both
challenges and opportunities for building public appreciation of peatland
cultural heritage. User-generated reviews offer, as-yet under-explored,
potential data for use by heritage researchers and managers who seek
to explore how visitors understand and use sites, and may also contribute
to the emerging intangible heritage of heritage landscapes.
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Published version
Citation
Flint A and Jennings BR (2021) The role of cultural heritage in visitor narratives of peatlands: analysis of online user-generated reviews from three peatland sites in England. International Journal of Heritage Studies. 28(2): 163-179.
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Notes
Research Development Fund Publication Prize Award winner, June 2021.