Storytelling and telling history. Towards a grammar of narratives for Cultural Heritage dissemination in the Digital Era

The paper represents an attempt to set up a theoretical framework for storytelling approach applied to Cultural Heritage. After a general analysis and a narrative theory review, the first topic addressed is the long-lasting problem of harmonizing freedom of narration (human creativity) and the constraints of scientific reliability: a debate which is at least 150 years old, but become particularly important in the digital era. Then, it will be set a classification of storytelling elements (arena, characters) inspired on similar ones shaped in the domain of semantics for literature, in order to create a working tool suitable for virtual museums and historical dissemination in a broad sense.