From Pixels to Pasts: Uncovering the Value of Shipwrecks Through Social Media

Introduction

People’s use of social media can reveal the intangible elements of our tangible marine heritage and reshape how we manage marine environments.

This article explores how social media helps uncover emotional, cultural, and social connections to the sea, in the hope of enhancing marine heritage protection and engagement.

Marine heritage online

When we think about shipwreck research, we might immediately picture divers exploring sunken vessels, Remotely Operated Vehicles or ‘ROVs’ investigating deep waters, or teams recovering precious artefacts from the ocean floor. But what about diving into discussions online or surfing the web for answers? This approach may sound unconventional, but it offers unique insights into how the public perceives, values, and engages with their marine heritage.

Working in partnership with Historic England, and the universities of Stirling and Edinburgh, my work is seeking to understand how the public values marine heritage so it can be better represented in frameworks where it is often excluded and overlooked. In the marine environment, values research often focuses on natural elements, with culture as an afterthought. I’m hoping to add to the growing body of work highlighting the importance of our marine cultural heritage alongside the natural.

My study, conducted in England and Wales, explores how social values related to shipwrecks are reflected in social media environments. Shipwrecks, like a lot of coastal heritage, tend to straddle the blurred line between culture and nature when in-situ in their environment. Perhaps mostly thought of for their histories, they can also transform into artificial reefs, provide havens free of trawling, and become synonymous with natural landscapes.

But are these shipwrecks of interest to people today? And how can social media provide insights into the values and meanings people attach to them? While traditional approaches like surveys offer structured insights into heritage values, social media provides a complementary layer—revealing diverse, large-scale, and often subconscious public perceptions, increasingly used to understand cultural connections to coastal and marine environments.

Why do we need it?

Traditional approaches to marine management focus heavily on the natural aspects of ecosystems, often treating cultural resources as secondary to the primary focus on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

While marine cultural heritage, including shipwrecks, is increasingly recognised as important—evidenced by the designation of protected wreck sites and initiatives led by organisations like Historic England— it is often treated as a form of cultural ecosystem service, a framework that tends to prioritise the tangible and economic over the intangible and experiential.

This approach fails to capture the full value of cultural heritage, especially intangible elements like memories, collective identity, and emotional connections. In this context, the term "social values" becomes essential, as it incorporates these intangible elements into the conversation.

Social values, as reflected in social media, offer an opportunity to capture these more subjective, personal aspects of how people interact with shipwrecks. Rather than reducing their value to an instrument of tourism or recreation, social media data allows us to tap into the deeper emotional and cultural connections people have with these relics. How do individuals express their personal connections to shipwrecks? What stories do they tell through their images, descriptions, and discussions? How do these online interactions shape public perceptions and can they influence marine conservation and management?

How I used social media to explore social values

In order to explore the social values associated with shipwrecks, I used a variety of methods to analyse social media data, focusing on Flickr as a rich source of user-generated content centred around image posting.

Flickr was chosen due to its accessible data extraction platform, where other platforms make it difficult for researchers to access information, and the popularity of photography in coastal areas. The UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) Ocean Literacy Headline Report identified photography as the second most popular activity in coastal and marine environments in England (Ocean Literacy Headline Report, 2022), highlighting its importance for understanding cultural and environmental values.

Similarly, Historic England's ‘Missing Pieces’ project uses photography to help people connect with their heritage, emphasising photography’s role not only as a popular pastime but also as a valuable tool for exploring and preserving cultural heritage.

I extracted data from just over 1,500 photos, along with their titles, tags, descriptions, and comments, spanning the last ten years through a key word search for ‘shipwreck’ and various variations of this word. This provided a varied dataset, revealing how people have interacted with shipwrecks online over time in England and Wales.

The process began with topic modelling, a form of computational text analysis that groups words into themes based on how frequently they appear together, which allowed me to uncover patterns and themes in the data related to shipwrecks. Then the analysis included a combination of qualitative approaches, manual image interpretation and thematic analysis of post descriptions and comments, to delve deeper into the context and meaning behind each photograph. These were complemented by spatial visualization techniques using GIS that helped identify geographical trends and patterns in shipwreck-related engagement. For example, I looked at how the geographical locations of shipwrecks were reflected in online discussions, considering whether certain wrecks were more likely to attract attention in specific regions or communities.

What are people talking about?

Social media discussions reveal not just where people engage with shipwrecks and maritime heritage, but how they connect to these sites. Whether through personal stories, aesthetic appreciation, or historical fascination, posts often express a sense of place and meaning tied to specific locations. Below are some of the most frequently mentioned sites and the topics that surfaced in discussions around them.

• Souter Lighthouse – Perched on the cliffs of Whitburn, Souter Lighthouse was the first in the world purpose-built to use electric power when it opened in 1871. People love to capture its stark colours against the coastal landscape surrounding it. But beyond its innovation and visual, it’s the ghost stories that linger. Visitors have reported unexplained chills, phantom footsteps, and the scent of tobacco in empty rooms. Some believe it’s the spirit of Isabella Darling, niece of famous lighthouse heroine Grace Darling, who once lived here.
• RMS Mulheim – This German cargo ship met an unfortunate (and somewhat ridiculous) fate at Land’s End in 2003 when the chief officer fell off his chair and got his trousers caught, distracting him just long enough for the ship to run aground. Though the wreck has since broken apart, it remains a favourite, cherished both for its rusted beauty in its natural environment and the bizarre story of its demise.
• Fleetwood Marsh Wrecks – Nestled in the wild landscape of Fleetwood Marsh Nature Reserve, a haunting fleet of abandoned fishing boats lies scattered along the River Wyre. Once proud symbols of Fleetwood’s booming fishing industry, these vessels were left behind when the tides of fortune turned during the Cod Wars and EU fishing quotas. Now, they sit half-sunken and rusting, merging into their natural landscape.
• St. Patrick’s Cave – Hidden along the Welsh coastline near Llanbadrig, this cave is said to have sheltered St. Patrick after a shipwreck. Whether or not the legend is true, it remains a place of quiet reflection—so much so that the Dalai Lama, upon visiting, called it "the most peaceful place on earth."

So, what can social media tell us about values?

After a lot of analysis and deep diving into people’s discussions, three main categories of value emerged.

Place-based values are central to public engagement with marine heritage. Social media discussions highlight strong attachments to specific shipwrecks and coastal landmarks, not just as physical sites but as symbols of local history, memory, and identity. This was particularly evident in storytelling around wrecks and built maritime heritage (e.g., lighthouses, memorials) in Cornwall and Norfolk, where past maritime events remain deeply embedded in community heritage.

Aesthetic values shape public appreciation of shipwrecks and their surrounding landscapes. The most dominant discussion topic reflected a fascination with ship graveyards like Purton, Gloucestershire, Fleetwood, Lancashire, and Hooe Lake, Devon, and abandoned intertidal wrecks like the RMS Mulheim in Cornwall. Posts often emphasised the beauty of decay, with carefully composed photographs capturing the contrast between wrecks and their natural settings - waves breaking against rusted hulls, seabirds perching on skeletal frames, or underwater wrecks teeming with marine life. Seascapes, landscapes, the coast, and sky were natural elements consistently mentioned in tandem with wrecks and their histories. This interplay between cultural and natural heritage is a defining aspect of how shipwrecks are visually valued.

History, storytelling, and commemoration emerge as key to relational values of marine heritage. Interestingly, nearly half (48.28%) of analysed images weren’t of shipwrecks themselves but of cultural markers—memorials, lighthouses, and lifeboats—demonstrating that public engagement often focuses on the human stories surrounding wrecks rather than the wrecks alone. The second most dominant topic in analysis, centred on shipwreck tragedies, rescues, and loss, showing how these sites act as vessels of memory, helping communities honour their maritime past.

How can these values be used for management?

Integrating marine cultural heritage into environmental-based frameworks remains challenging due to the difficulty in valuing intangible cultural elements.

However, this study highlights the importance of incorporating intangible heritage into environmental policies, recognising both officially protected and undesignated sites, and promoting emotive, human-centred narratives. While privacy concerns may limit data collection from social media, combining traditional and digital methods offers a more comprehensive understanding of public values related to maritime heritage.

To apply these values in marine management, measures could include expanding legal protections to cover intangible heritage, creating exclusion zones around culturally significant sites, and ensuring cultural heritage is explicitly integrated into marine spatial planning and environmental impact assessments. Aligning cultural significance with environmental stewardship in this way could reshape how shipwrecks and their surrounding ecosystems are managed.

To conclude: the impact of the research

Further information