A Crowdsourcing-Based Digital Storytelling Platform for Preserving Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of Southern Thai Textiles

The preservation of tacit knowledge embedded in Southern Thai textiles remains a significant challenge because much of this knowledge is dispersed across private households and is inadequately supported by conventional object-centered documentation systems. This study developed a crowdsourcing-based digital storytelling platform that enabled communities to document, organize, and disseminate knowledge related to Southern Thai textile heritage. The platform integrated community participation, structured narrative authoring, and knowledge organization within a socio-technical system designed for cultural heritage documentation. To guide its development, the study proposed the Crowdsourced-Storytelling Intangible Cultural Heritage Framework (CS-ICH Framework) and operationalizes it through requirements analysis, iterative prototyping, and empirical user evaluation. The evaluation results indicated high levels of user satisfaction and positive user perceptions regarding knowledge accessibility, content organization, and the platform’s support for heritage preservation. These findings suggested that participatory digital platforms can effectively facilitate the documentation and dissemination of locally embedded cultural knowledge that is difficult to capture through conventional institutional systems. This study contributed to digital heritage research by providing a potentially transferable framework and design principles for integrating crowdsourcing and digital storytelling within platforms designed to preserve and transmit intangible and community-held cultural heritage.