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From Space to Typology: A Spatial and Textual Analysis of UNESCO OUV Discourse in Europe
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Department of ALM.
2026 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 20 credits / 30 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

This study examines how UNESCO’s standardized Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) framework operates discursively and spatially across European cultural heritage sites.  Critical Heritage Studies has long theorized Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) as a homogenizing institutional force, yet the large-scale spatial organization of this discourse within official heritage texts has remained underexplored. This study addresses that gap by combining computational text analysis with spatial statistical methods. The empirical material consists of a corpus of 127 European cultural World Heritage OUV texts inscribed after 2006, with analysis focused on the Brief Synthesis sections. TF-IDF keyword extraction and co-occurrence analysis identify four recurring discursive dimensions: Urban/Architecture, Landscape/Environment, Social/Religious, and Development/Influence. These dimensions are operationalized as standardized thematic variables and examined spatially through Global Moran’s I and Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA). The results show that only the Landscape/Environment dimension exhibits statistically significant spatial autocorrelation (I = −0.107, p = 0.018). The negative Moran’s I value indicates a structure of local contrast rather than regional clustering. LISA analysis identifies six statistically significant local cases, dominated by High-Low spatial outliers in which sites characterized by strong landscape-oriented discourse are embedded within surrounding built-heritage contexts. The remaining three discursive dimensions display no significant spatial structure, suggesting geographically consistent distributions across Europe. These findings indicate that discursive differentiation within the OUV corpus is organized primarily along typological rather than regional lines. Sites designated under UNESCO’s Cultural Landscape category consistently employ landscapeoriented vocabulary regardless of national location, while built heritage sites maintain similar architectural discourse across different European regions. The study argues that AHD achieves universality not through geographically uniform cultural expression, but through a standardized evaluative framework capable of organizing different heritage types into institutionally recognizable forms of value. The project contributes an empirically grounded refinement of AHD theory and demonstrates a reproducible methodological framework for the computational spatial analysis of institutional heritage discourse.  

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2026. , p. 62
Keywords [en]
UNESCO World Heritage, Outstanding Universal Value (OUV), Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD), Spatial Humanities, Spatial Autocorrelation, Moran’s I, Corpus Linguistics, Cultural Heritage
National Category
Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Arts
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-596364OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-596364DiVA, id: diva2:2094830
Subject / course
Digital humanities
Educational program
Master's Programme in Digital Humanities
Supervisors
Examiners
Available from: 2026-08-24 Created: 2026-08-24 Last updated: 2026-08-24Bibliographically approved

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
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  • Other style
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  • de-DE
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  • en-US
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Output format
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  • asciidoc
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