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Paper short abstract

The paper analyzes brief digital narratives that users share when reviewing Japanese gardens on Google Maps. Stories address issues of remains and survival of nature vis-à-vis the supernatural/non-natural catastrophe of war & atomic bombing. A hybrid genre emerges, combining multiple materialities.

Paper long abstract

The paper is part of a larger funded research that is dedicated to the study of descriptions and evaluations that users of the Google Maps Review platform upload and share in relation to the aftermaths of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki). The paper focuses on multimodal reviews that address outdoor public attractions, sites and scenes, by combining the fields of “platform studies” (from a media and communication approach; see Papacharissi, 2018; Plantin et al., 2018), with that of digital storytelling (from a sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropology approaches). Specifically, platform studies sheds light on the ways digital stories and storytelling may be configured online, as well as on related issues of power-relations, as these are shapes by platforms’ design and affordances. In relation to digital storytelling, this paper adopts the “small stories” perspective (Georgakopoulou, 2017, 2022), which highlights how brief multimodal texts may be prolifically considered as stories.

The study examines simultaneously the materialities of both nature itself, and of the platforms through which digital narratives of the (super)natural can be publicly conveyed. It focuses on issues remains and survival in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose natures have been devastated during WWII, specifically by nuclear bombing (with lasting radioactive consequences). Examining small stories shared by domestic and international visitors to Japanese gardens in these cities offers a unique genre of small stories.