Nicole Basaraba is a transdisciplinary scholar based in media studies and digital humanities. Her research domain focuses on evaluating digital narrative productions and developing best practices for creating interactive and transmedia narratives for cultural heritage sites.

Her interests are in non-fiction narratives, but most specifically in cultural heritage, slow and dark tourism, and public history projects with a global context (i.e., cross border and multinational narratives). She examines how participatory digital cultures and globalisation impact and influence digital narrative productions for cultural heritage tourists (both local visitors and international visitors). Her current and future research covers challenges, such as the increasing production of cross-media tourism content and digital experiences; the democratisation of multiple perspectives on cultural heritage sites and historical events; issues with mass tourism in the preservation of cultural heritage sites; and examining how cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) and other heritage researchers/professionals are experimenting with digital storytelling.

Nicole has previously explored different narrative genres including interactive web documentaries, digital history exhibitions, mobile applications, and more recently VR and AR experiences, all of which fall under her transmedial approach. 

Her most recent research has focused on the concept of “digital place-making” and “creative place-making” for tourism. This was applied to analysis of how shared cultural heritage in the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion could be co-created by different communities, provinces, and language-speaking groups. Projects she worked on in this niche was examining the European Capitals of Culture Initiative, the Terra Mosana—We Draw the Past project, and the co-supervision of a PhD student, at Maastricht University (due to submit in Dec 2022), who is researching the border street in the Netherlands and Germany known as Neustraße/Nieuwstraat (Herzogenrath/Kerkrade). Nicole has also supervised four Master's students' theses and is open to supervising PhD students with topics related to her research interests.

Research Interests: 

• transmedia narratives
• digital humanities 
• rhetoric / persuasion
• narratology
• cultural heritage 
• slow tourism 
• dark tourism
• participatory digital cultures

Nicole Basaraba holds a PhD in Digital Humanities from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, which was funded by the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technologies and supported by the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultural Studies. She also has a Master of Arts in Communications and Technology, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Alberta, Canada. In addition to her academic background, Nicole has over eight years of international experience in digital communications/PR and project management primarily in higher education, but also in non-profits, government, and a marketing agency.

Nicole’s PhD research was on interactive digital narratives (IDN) ‒ an umbrella term to encompass various formats of digital storytelling ‒ could increase public interest in cultural heritage, the types of histories shared, and allow for evolving interpretations and public participation in narrative co-creation. She developed a prototyped iDoc as a creative practice output on the 11 UNESCO World Heritage Australian Convict Sites. In addition to this work, she also collaborated on two other multi-partner projects, namely the National Famine Way (Ireland) and the Remixing Industrial Pasts in the Digital Age (Luxembourg). Nicole is open to new opportunities for forming collaborations between academia, creative industries, and the cultural heritage sector since real-world challenges inspire her research and teaching.