Understanding Digital Sense of Place in Living Heritage Streets Through Multimodal Social Media Analysis: A Case Study of Songyang’s Ming–Qing Old Street

Historic streets, as living heritage environments, preserve everyday cultural practices while facing increasing digital mediation in tourism and daily life. This study examines how a digital sense of place is constructed online in the Ming–Qing Old Street of Songyang, China. User-generated text and image data were collected primarily from Weibo, supplemented by user reviews from major travel platforms, including Dianping, Fliggy, Mafengwo, and Ctrip, and analysed through a multimodal framework. BERTopic was applied to identify thematic narratives in textual content, and ResNet-50 was used to classify visual scene elements in shared images, enabling an integrated interpretation of textual and visual representations. The results reveal four dominant dimensions of digital place perception: local food culture, living handicrafts, historic spatial fabric, and everyday atmosphere. Textual narratives emphasise emotional attachment and experiential interpretation, while visual representations highlight photogenic, performative, and shareable street scenes. The integration of these modalities forms a layered digital sense of place grounded in cultural continuity and daily life. The study demonstrates the value of multimodal social media analysis in understanding how living heritage streets are digitally represented and perceived, offering implications for sustainable heritage conservation, community-centred revitalisation, and data-informed cultural tourism management.