People who feel their heritage is theirs keep coming back to it, a study of Digital Dunhuang finds

The Mogao Caves at Dunhuang hold more than a millennium of Buddhist art — and through the Digital Dunhuang platform, anyone with a screen can walk them from anywhere on Earth. A peer-reviewed study published in npj Heritage Science asked 504 users of Digital Dunhuang and similar platforms what makes people stay, return and recommend. The answer was not the technology. Experiencing the heritage shaped how people felt, and the strongest predictor of all was cultural identity — the sense that this heritage is part of who I am. Emotional experience and satisfaction mattered too, but identity carried the day in both the statistical modelling and the neural-network analysis. For museums everywhere racing to digitise collections, the lesson is plain: pixels open the door, but belonging is what brings people back through it.

SDG 11 · Sustainable cities and communities