Digital Approaches for the Protection of Inner Mongolia’s Paper-Cutting Art as Intangible Cultural Heritage
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52152/heranca.v9i2/1257Keywords:
Inner Mongolia’s Paper-Cutting; Intangible Cultural; Heritage Safeguarding; Digital Adoption; Immersive Technologies (VR/AR); Knowledge Graphs.Abstract
One of the key elements of the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) of China, the paper-cutting art of Inner Mongolia, is increasingly facing a threat in terms of preservation and transmission within the context of the quickly modernised society and demographic changes. Even though the use of digital technologies is promoted as a way of preserving ICH, their actual impact is not sufficiently researched. The study will analyze the consequences of adopting digital technologies on the outcomes of heritage preservation, such as digital twins, virtual/augmented reality virtual reality (VR) and aumented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and knowledge graphs, based on the original survey data of 200 artisans and heritage institutions carried out in 2024-2025. Using the mixed-method method and regression analysis, we can find that there exists a positive statistically significant influence of digital adoption on the performance in preservation and that the increase of one unit in the index of digital adoption has a positive effect on the preservation scores by 2.41-points (p < 0.001). Though knowledge of digital technologies, on the one hand, is positively related to preservation, mediation analysis indicates that the relationship between digital adoption and preservation is not significantly mediated by artisans' knowledge of digital technologies, and the indirect relationship is insignificant. Further results indicate that the positive impact of digital adoption is increased with policy support. The results show that digital technologies aid in maintaining a heritage primarily through direct and ecosystem-scale effects and not through the transmission of personal knowledge. The research gives empirical data to guide the development of integrated, policy-enhanced digital policies to preserve intangible cultural heritage.
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