Google Map Reviews: A Window into Plantation Narratives

The experiences offered by plantation museums “amount to a virtual recommodification and recommercialization of black bodies in the modern moment” and/or mythologies of the antebellum south . The commodification of black spirits and historical marginalization are the foundation for plantation sites’ narrative worlds. Carter, Butler, and Alderman  present a revised framework of plantation narrativized worlds, drawing on Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, and Cain (as cited in ) to illustrate how society, plantations, and audiences interact to shape and circulate historical narratives. Building on this framework, this study extends the analysis of plantation narrative worlds into networked digital spaces by examining online reviews posted to public platforms. Using computational methods and OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini, this research analyzes and categorizes visitor reviews from plantation museums located along the 70-mile stretch of the Great Mississippi River Road. By evaluating how visitors’ narrative appraisals reflect, reproduce, or potentially challenge institutional narrative, the study investigates whether plantation-produced narratives travel beyond the physical site through electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM).