Co-Creating Digital Heritage Experiences with Young Visitors in Central Vietnam

This paper investigates community-authored heritage storytelling in relation to narrative recall scores among young visitors in Central Vietnam. The objective is to establish an evaluative framework and an analytical strategy to measure visitor engagement and interpretive outcomes prior to large-scale field implementation. The hypothesized mechanism posits that collective authorship enhances interpretive coherence, while structured curatorial review prevents cultural simplification. Using a structured experimental sample of 132 case observations, the study incorporates balanced intervention allocation, a standardized baseline measure of visitor familiarity, a binary contextual support variable (curatorial review capacity), and a continuous narrative recall score index. An adjusted linear regression model is applied to estimate the intervention contrast at equal contextual support, complemented by a 400-resample bootstrap procedure for robust uncertainty assessment. The adjusted intervention contrast is 3.90 index units (approximate 95% CI: [1.69, 6.12]), compared to an unadjusted contrast of 3.41. Five effect parameter scenarios, evaluated across 200 repetitions each, examine estimation bias, root mean squared error (RMSE), and empirical interval coverage. The findings demonstrate that baseline visitor familiarity and organizational curatorial capacity significantly moderate the effectiveness of participatory heritage interventions. Practical recommendations emphasize rigorous scoring protocols, institutional oversight, and balanced evaluation of community perspectives.