Cinematic narrative mapping for linear cultural heritage: a script-driven method for semantic representation and spatiotemporal narratives

Linear cultural heritage records long-term interactions among landscapes, infrastructure, institutions, communities, and cultural memory. Communicating this complexity requires transforming dispersed historical evidence into a coherent spatiotemporal narrative. Existing digital-heritage and narrative-mapping approaches can represent geographic change and multimedia content; however, the connections among historical evidence, cultural relationships, and visual presentation often remain implicit. An explicit evidence-to-presentation pathway is therefore needed to maintain narrative coherence and ensure that visual scenes remain aligned with their historical basis and cultural meaning. This paper puts forward a script-driven cinematic narrative mapping method that uses a film script to connect heritage information organization with map-based visual narration. Organize the various sources into related narrative units, and then translate these into map scenes, temporal shifts and shot sequences within a continuous area. The above methods were applied to the Qingjiangpu. A comparative user evaluation showed that the cinematic narrative map achieved an accuracy of 88.3% in spatiotemporal comprehension and 78.3% in the understanding of cultural relationships, significantly exceeding that of the text-image story map and documentary-style video. Based on the above results, it can be seen that cinematic narrative mapping is suitable for integrating historical evidence, geographical processes and cultural meanings to present linear cultural heritage.