The role of cultural heritage in wellbeing perceptions: a web-based software analysis in two Italian provinces

Abstract

In the last decades, the Internet and the Web have given citizens unprecedented possibilities of communication and contents co-creation, which produce a huge amount of data about the places which they live in.  The advent of social Web has been recently upsetting patterns of re-territorialization, practices of urban experiences as well as uses of cultural heritage, growingly mediated by ICTs so that an extraordinary repository of online data and e-discourses has been affecting the imageries which territories are built on. As a result, analysing the territories and their tangible and intangible cultural assets through data retrieved from the Web has received considerable attention as a promising method for place-based applied researches focused on several territorial dimensions, ranging from sustainability to wellbeing and heritage. Particularly, this paper aims at critically exploring the role of cultural heritage in influencing the online narratives and perceptions of territorial wellbeing in two Italian provinces selected as case studies. Although the Web data use is not without its challenges, the paper is focused on a multi-method approach encompassing Web data retrieval, selection, classification and analysis, in addition to an exploration based on the Sentiment Analysis approach, aimed at investigating the online “sentiment” about local cultural heritage and its implications in terms of collective wellbeing in two selected Italian provinces. The main goal is to compare narratives about the interplay between cultural heritage and wellbeing in areas included in official rankings of quality of life, based on a set of indicators, with those co-created in the Web in order to provide new theoretical/methodological insights on the challenges and potentialities deriving from the use of web-based sentiment analysis methodologies in territorial research.