NODEM 2014 Proceedings

Towards a Significant Portuguese Cultural Heritage – An Intervention from the Design Perspective
through social technologies, is becoming a central issue in the development of a significant Portuguese Cultural
Heritage.
Probing the Portuguese Community of Material Culture Bloggers
We will now describe an empirical study developed in order to offer a better understanding of the Portuguese
reality regarding the use of social technologies in the process of collecting and preserving our material cultural
heritage. Therefore, we have carried out an explorative study investigating the information that citizens publish
everyday on one specific social technology: blogs. This was an obvious choice as blogging is probably the
most implemented practice of social public sharing of personal information and, although all of these technologies
have only existed for a few years, blogging is one of the oldest.
To focus our efforts, it was necessary to operationalize and circumscribe the main aspects of this topic. Initially,
when defining what would be eligible to propose as an object of study, we decided to choose some keywords
that would permit us, by running them on various search engines, to delimit a large sample of blogs. From that
first selection we scrutinised the ones that explicitly presented at least ten posts about Portuguese artefacts in
the last one hundred published. After this process we ended up with seventy-five blogs that we identified as
the “universe”, and from which we conducted the main investigation.
During the early stages we mostly concentrated on two research questions:
1) Does the practice of socially generating information about historical Portuguese artefacts exist and how is
it characterized?
2) If the answer to the first question is affirmative, what kind of information is being published on these
blogs?
Method
The research design method was mainly based on the Grounded Theory Method, whilst using aspects of analytic
induction (Gerrish & Lacey, 2013) and matrix analysis (Miles, 1994). The investigation was founded on the
constructivist understanding of reality assuming that individuals generate subjective reality in the process of
construction (Glasersfeld, 2005) and accepting that the subjective reality of others is a limited process and can
only take place through communication (Rusch, 2007). As scholars, we are consequently not objective beings,
and, obviously, that influences the findings through our interpretations. Assuming this position, we have centred
the investigation on the principles of constructivist grounded theory (Mills, Bonner, & Francis, 2008). The
Grounded Theory Method “foster[s] seeing your data in fresh ways and exploring your ideas about the data
through early analytic writing. By adopting grounded theory methods you can direct, manage, and streamline
your data collection and, moreover, construct an original analysis of your data” (Charmaz, 2006). The main
feature of grounded theory is a structured but highly iterative procedure of simultaneous data collection and
analysis, based on constant comparison between already coded and new data samples (Charmaz, 2006).
Our investigation can be split into two different, yet interrelated, stages. In both phases, a sample of blogs was
selected and analyzed. In the first stage, we conducted a survey, using the Typeform 1 platform, applied to all
the seventy-five blogs identified as the “universe”. This survey intended to deepen the previously initiated characterization
of each of the blogs: their authors, the content and the motivations and objectives behind these
practices. After two incidences of direct contact with the authors we received fifteen complete and validated
answers.
1
http://www.typeform.com
NODEM 2014 Conference & Expo
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