Indonesian tourism and batik: an online map.

Indonesian tourism has been promoting extensively the country's heritage, be it tangible or intangible. In particular, Batik hand-drawn tradition is featured as a major attraction, encompassing materials and production techniques, motifs, fashion and wearing rules, as well as its philosophic and spiritual roots. Batik has been, additionally, enlisted in 2009 among the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list, providing a further opportunity for Indonesian tourism to leverage on this. An extensive research, covering both the Indonesian and the English languages, so to cater for domestic and international travelers, has been performed online in order to unveil the role played by Batik within the tourism-related online narratives. Such research has considered the main actors (be they national or international ones), has well as the most frequent types of contents and viewpoints on the Batik online tourism-related world of meaning. While a clear role of Batik as part of Indonesia-related tourism narratives is depicted, the research shows that most of the values stressed by UNESCO are only seldom covered and that there is room for improvement when it comes to providing a deeper understanding of Batik to domestic and international travelers.