Promoting Agritourism in Poland with Ready-Made Digital Components and Rustic Cyberfolklore

Abstract

Online content can have unique cultural value. It is certainly the case for digital representations of folklore found on websites related to rural tourism, including agritourism. It is true for both archaic websites, copies of which are found in digital archives, and modern websites. The purpose of this paper is to assess the frequency of ready-made digital components and rustic folklore on agritourism farms’ websites. The exploration and comparative analysis involved 866 websites from two independent sets: (1) archaic websites, copies of which are available in the Internet Archive and (2) currently operational websites published in the Polish ccTLD (country code top-level domain). We employed HTML code exploration to verify the websites’ development technique and their selected characteristics, including content management systems (CMSs) and responsiveness. In the set of the ccTLD websites, we recorded such design attributes as the type of graphic layout, hero image, and parallax scrolling. The research demonstrated that ready-made folklore graphics were relatively rare among the investigated websites. Elements of rustic cyberfolklore were found only on 17 archaic websites (approx. 4%) and 52 ccTLD websites (approx. 12%). They were most often Kashubian patterns. The research suggests that rustic cyberfolklore is most often found on websites of agritourism farms in areas where local communities and ethnic groups are particularly active and strongly identify with regional traditions.