IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

We present a novel hybrid humanities-computational framework utilizing Augmented Reality (AR) and 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct and critically interpret the multi-layered urban environments embedded within specific literary chronotopes. Aiming at re-contextualizing the lived spatial and historical dimensions of a poet’s everyday life and poems within diverse cities and metropolises, this study operationalizes narrative analysis for immersive cultural experience. The primary objective is to transcend conventional, static cultural heritage documentation by enabling profound, embodied engagement with the literary chronotope. The system re-contextualizes the poet’s lived space by facilitating embodied simulation. AR fundamentally requires the user’s physical movement within the urban fabric, transforming the visitor into an “active participant” or “parallel protagonist” in the narrative trajectory of the poet. This kinaesthetic interaction fosters a primary, affective engagement, creating a spatialized form of literary empathy by recruiting sensorimotor and emotional neural circuits, thus grounding the aesthetic experience in bodily simulation. The narrative becomes experienced not merely as an intellectual exercise, but as a rich, multisensory enactment of the poet’s world. By fusing the immaterial and expressive structure of the literary narrative—the emotional and historical salience of the author’s perception—with the material constraints of the contemporary city, the framework constructs a hybrid urban chronotope. This synthesis utilizes AR to digitally overlay and superimpose visual and auditory fragments of the poet’s past directly onto the current physical landscape. This approach reveals the city as a profound historical palimpsest, exposing stratified layers of collective and cultural memory inscribed in the urban material.