As the Chinese saying goes,"Knowledge gained from books is never deep enough—true understanding comes from hands-on experience." This experience led us to deeper reflections on the theories behind digital cultural heritage, which we will now explore in the following section.
According to Van Leeuwen (2015), multimodality emphasizes the construction of meaning through the interaction of a range of semiotic modes such as text, images, and interactivity. In the Voyager project, the plush toy Totoro is not only a digitized being but also a narrative node that bridges Japanese animation, the ethnic culture of the Dai, and environmental discourse. By adding 3D visualization, annotations, and textual narrative, we make a multimodal experience available for users, allowing them to engage with the world of Totoro beyond its commodity status, recontextualizing it as a cultural artefact.
In contrast with a static museum exhibit, websites like Voyager enable multileveled interaction with the symbolic and environmental culture of Totoro. Schreibman and Gillikin Schoueri (2024) think multimodal narrative on web sites of digital history enables active meaning-making, with the users not being given information but making their own meaning by navigation and interaction. Similarly, users of our project navigate disparate interpretative levels, the Shinto nature god Totoro, a plush toy embroiled in global consumerism, and a character infused with Dai symbolic meaning, each existing side by side online.
Nevertheless, multimodal interaction does not necessarily resolve such tensions between these meanings, but rather brings their contradictions into the open. Raptis et al. (2021) also suggest that multimodal interactions can reinforce and veil meaning, depending on their structure. In the example, the smooth transition of stories: from the origin of Totoro from Japanese ecologism and its commodification as a plush toy, raises the following question: Does digital mediation deepen cultural authenticity, or does it further reify it into a context-sensitive construct?
Through multimodal theory, the project not only introduces us to the digital nature of Totoro, but also positions it as a site of cultural negotiations, demonstrating the potential of digital media for preserving and reworking the symbolic meanings of things.