Does ‘hot interpretation’ depend on time? New ways of understanding why some heritage is not hot

Kocsis, Andrea (2023) Does ‘hot interpretation’ depend on time? New ways of understanding why some heritage is not hot. In: International Conference of Heritage and Affect, 17 November 2023.

Abstract

The International Conference of Heritage and Affect is organized as a complement to The International Handbook of Heritage and Affect, invited by Routledge. ---- Can digital humanities rewrite concepts from non-digital heritage studies? With the help of distant reading, my chapter aims to re-evaluate why some heritage sites do not evoke hot cognition in visitors. The term 'hot interpretation' was introduced by David Uzzell, who suggests that there is a direct emotional way in which we can interpret experiences before or without thinking them over. This emotional engagement can be fired if the experience resonates with our personal past, nationalist feelings, community values, and ideological beliefs and convictions. According to Uzzell, the same is true when visitors meet heritage sites. Uzzell found that our emotional engagement is reduced as time separates us from past events. In other words, the likelihood of emotional reactions in response to a heritage site depends on the time passed between the original traumatic event and the visit. He thought this was why the Clifford Tower in York, the scene of a 12th c. pogrom and massacre, did not affect the visitors. However, I argue that the exhibition's curation, the site's authenticity, the story-telling, and levels of immersion play a more critical role in the hot cognition than the time that has passed since the actual tragic event. To test my hypothesis, I have analysed more than 10.000 TripAdvisor reviews about heritage sites commemorating temporally distant but culturally available tragedies and conflicts using different exhibition techniques, such as the Clifford Tower in York, the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, the Medieval Massacre exhibit at the Swedish History Museum, and the Memorial Garden of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in Paris. Distant reading methods (Natural Language Processing, word embedding, sentiment analysis, topic modelling, etc.) allow researchers to approach large datasets that would be impossible to analyse manually. With the help of machine learning algorithms, scholars can extract patterns and trends from thousands of pages of text. This large-scale view can bring insights that might not be immediately apparent. In our case, it highlighted how the ten thousand visitors reacted to these sites of atrocities and answered whether the sites’ affect on the visitor indeed depends on temporal distance or if other factors are more important. I expect my chapter to demonstrate how interdisciplinary approaches and digital humanities methods can contribute to revisiting foundational theories accepted as axioms in heritage studies, thus opening up new ways of interpreting heritage affect. As this chapter assesses new methods for evaluating visitors’ experiential outcomes in heritage environments that are designed to elicit intense sensory experiences, it can make a valuable contribution to Section 5: Emerging Methodologies.

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