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This symposium will explore approaches to heritage interpretation in both physical and digital domains, with a focus on museums, cultural tourism, education, and entertainment contexts. This interdisciplinary, international symposium will connect fields including critical heritage studies, folkloristics, digital media and games studies, area studies, and beyond. A focus will be on drawing connections and facilitating exchange of ideas and perspectives between scholars and practitioners in the U.S. and internationally. Conference organizers have a particular research focus on Serbia and the Balkans, and we are especially interested in submissions that come from this region. This gathering will allow heritage scholars and professionals the opportunity to address preservationist, educational, advocacy, and commercial approaches to heritage interpretation. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Developing museum and heritage site interpretation
• Developing museum apps and games based on folklore and intangible cultural heritage
• Approaches to adapting cultural heritage into commercial video games
• Efforts to preserve tangible heritage using immersive media (extended reality or XR)
• Developing archives to preserve and disseminate cultural heritage
• Developing heritage education resources
• Digital and interactive storytelling projects based on folklore taking place in schools and cultural organizations
• Institutional approaches to developing digital heritage collaborations and infrastructure

The symposium will be held July 15-18, 2027 at Arkansas State University, Jonesboro. It is sponsored by A-State’s Jonesboro’s Heritage Studies Ph.D. Program with the University of Central Florida’s Games and Interactive Media program. This symposium is a special event that helps commemorate 25 years of heritage studies at A-State. This will be a hybrid symposium so that those who cannot travel to Jonesboro, Arkansas in person will also be able to participate.

Interested participants can propose one of several different types of presentation: individual conference paper (20-25 minutes) or panel (3-4 thematically-linked individual conference papers and a discussant); roundtable discussion (3-5 participants and a moderator); workshop (a short, approximately 1 hour mini-class on a method or tool); or exhibition (poster presentation or project display).

Proposals are due December 1, 2026 and should be emailed to the following address: natalie.underberggoode@gmail.com. Include the subject heading: Heritage Interpretation Across Physical and Digital Space symposium.

Aims and Scope:

This series focuses on research monographs and edited collections that highlight folklore and intangible cultural heritage in games and interactive media, considering the role of expressive culture in diverse digital media domains including but not limited to video games, websites, mobile apps, immersive platforms, and interactive narrative. The series is especially interested in research exploring the role of folkloric figures, folklore archetypes and motifs, and place-based folk groups and folklife in video games and interactive media. Contributions to this series could be organized around one or more of these aspects of folklore in a way that brings together the insights of folkloristics with that of related fields including video game studies, digital and interactive media studies, and cultural studies.

Natalie Underberg-Goode holds a Ph.D. in Folklore from Indiana University, Bloomington, and is Professor in the Games and Interactive Media program at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of Multiplicity and Cultural Representation in Transmedia Storytelling (2023), co-author of Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, Narrative, and New Media (2013), and co-editor of Exploring Digital Ethnography: From Principles to Practice (2025). She is the former electronic media featured and reviewed projects editor for the Journal of American Folklore as well as former chair of the Florida Folklife Council.

Call For Proposals:

I am currently soliciting proposals for consideration. Topics may consider, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Folkloric figures in contemporary video games and interactive media;
• The transmedia adaptation of folktales, legends, and myths;
• The role of folk belief in video games and interactive media;
• The role of intangible cultural heritage in the development of a country’s (or countries’) game market(s);
• Comparing the use and adaptation of real-world folklore and intangible cultural heritage for primarily commercial/entertainment-based purposes versus for informal education or advocacy aims; and
• How games and interactive media, broadly conceived, give rise to new forms of folklore and/or folk group practices.

Please send initial expressions of interest in proposing a title for this series to Natalie Underberg-Goode (Natalie.Underberg-Goode@ucf.edu).

I recently returned from a research visit to Serbia. I gave several talks/workshops, including ones in Novi Sad (Museum of Vojvodina and University of Novi Sad) and Belgrade (University of Belgrade). In addition, I made site visits to and networked with Serbian heritage and digital media professionals, including in Knjaževac (Homeland Museum of Knjaževac). I’m excited to explore possibilities for future collaboration with colleagues in Serbia and the U.S. I’ve been fortunate to connect to this year. Thanks to my university and the sabbatical committee for enabling me to have this experience! Хвала (Hvala)!

I just returned from a wonderful research trip to Arkansas to give talks on digital heritage and the topic of my most recent book project, shapeshifters in video games. I’m grateful to the Heritage Studies program at Arkansas State University Jonesboro, who hosted my talk on digital heritage, and to the Arkansas State University Beebe campus for inviting me to present on shapeshifters in video games. In particular, my dear colleague Dr. Gregory Hansen was a fantastic host throughout my brief trip, and thanks to him I was also able to meet some of his graduate students and visit several heritage sites in the area and see their students at work interpreting local heritage for visitors. You can read more about the talk at Arkansas State University Jonesboro here: https://www.astate.edu/news/speaker-to-address-digital-heritage-design

The book I edited with my wonderful colleague Marty Otañez has just been published, entitled Exploring Digital Ethnography: From Principles to Practice. As explained in the book description, the work “places digital ethnography within the context of the production of multimedia, multisensory ‘research-creation’ pieces using a variety of methods, tools, and techniques.” Individual chapters focus on case studies including digital and interactive storytelling, digital photography/video, worldbuilding, autoethnographic cartooning and beyond. You can check out more information here:

https://www.routledge.com/Exploring-Digital-Ethnography-From-Principles-to-Practice/Underberg-Goode-Otanez/p/book/9781032436982?

The book also features a companion website, which contains curated resources and materials designed to introduce readers to the methods, tools, and techniques discussed in the individual chapters:

https://clas.ucdenver.edu/anthropology/exploring-digital-ethnography

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work with some really thoughtful and creative scholars on this project!

The new special issue of Contemporary Legend has been published! It is available here: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cl/index

This special issue, which I guest edited, focuses on Creepy Pasta, Digital Horror, and Legend Formation. It includes articles that began as papers written by my students in a graduate Contemporary Topics seminar I taught focused on folklore and mythology in games and interactive media. The issue includes articles by these students as well as other scholars. The special issue covers creepypasta and related digital horror topics including The Backrooms, Herobrine, and Siren Head, among others, and focuses on themes including nostalgia, fear, and anxiety in creepypasta; ostension and legend-tripping in digital spaces; and the role of new platforms and shifting subjectivities in our understanding and experience of creepypasta, digital horror, and legend formation online.

 

Our article on the Life/Ways project came out recently in the journal Storytelling Self Society. It was written with Digital Media MA graduate student Alex Boyd. In the article we focused on the experience of teaching students how to design and develop digital stories and visual novel games based on their personal narratives. Focused on the question “What if I had made a different decision at a key moment in my life?”, the project allowed them, and us, to explore the relationship between fiction and reality in personal storytelling. You can find the article here: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/storytelling/vol15/iss2/5/

I am happy to have joined the great new editorial team at the Journal of American Folklore as Digital Resources Editor, working with my colleague and former graduate school classmate Lisa Gilman who begins her term as Editor-in-Chief. The position provides a really valuable opportunity to help promote recognition of folklore-oriented digital projects.

You can read more about the new editorial team here: https://www.afsnet.org/news/477338/New-JAF-Editors-Ready-for-Submissions

If you have an idea for a digital resource you would like to review, or have a digital resource review suggestion, please reach out to me at Natalie.Underberg-Goode@ucf.edu so I can share our submission guidelines.

 

 

This Fall I had the honor of being inducted into UCF’s Scroll & Quill Society, an honor society that recognizes faculty contributions in research and creative work. My fellow colleague from Nicholson School of Communication and Media, Ann Miller, was inducted as well.

 

You can read more about the award and our work here:

https://communication.ucf.edu/two-from-nscm-enter-scroll-quill-society/

I haven’t had the time to update my blog for a while now (2018 was my last post!). A while back I had the chance to be interviewed about the Portal to Peru digital heritage project (https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/portaltoperu). You can see the interview here:

It was a good opportunity to briefly share some of the main project goals and objectives, and I think it serves as a helpful introduction to the website. Thanks to my colleague Barry Mauer for doing the interview.