Social digital memory in the borderlands: An ontology-based digital humanities approach to analyzing semiotic activity on Social Network Sites
Creators: name: Dallas, Costis
name: Laužikas, Rimvydas
name: Kelpšienė, Ingrida
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022

description: Studying communicative interactions on social network sites presents special challenges for research. In the CONNECTIVE digital memory in the borderlands project, we are developing strategies and methods to address some of these challenges, as we seek to investigate how members of networks such as Facebook, Instagram and vKontacte engage in memory and identity work involving aspects of cultural heritage and the difficult past in Lithuania. We employ an ontology-based approach across all phases of our research process, from data collection and representation to analysis and theory building, which we championed in earlier research on analyzing talk and conversation in digital humanities and digital public archaeology settings. While not quantitative and positivist, our research framework bridges computational datacentred methods with theoretically-informed interpretive lens, drawing from cultural-historical activity theory and cultural semiotics to represent social media interactions on difficult heritage and memory as purposeful activities which involve grassroots and institutional mnemonic actors with different motivations and belonging to different communicative worlds (semiospheres), which are enabled by multiple mediating tools including social network site affordances, prior beliefs, presuppositions, competencies, norms, and semiotic processes such as narrativization, creolization and translation, and which are directed towards historically and culturally-contingent objects in the context of relevant contemporary settings. Our data consists of several thousand threads from social network sites, collected by multiple researchers, represented as knowledge graphs representing the conversational structure of messages (posts and comments) in connection with the mnemonic actors (writers, commenters) who created them, and transcribed into a textual corpus for qualitative text analysis. Theoretical framing, database structure, provisional code system, interviewing scripts, and analytical structure is aligned with an ontological domain model we developed (Kirtiklis et al., to appear). Categorization of structural and thematic aspects of messages is dictionary-based, benefiting from descriptive auto-coding of all threads in the graph database, and from named entity recognition and collocation analysis of salient dictionary terms in the corpus to identification of attributional and predicational discursive practices regarding key concepts. Rather than aiming at big data and distant reading strategies, we focus on thick description and qualitative close reading of small, complex data. This provides a framework for multiple further strands of analysis by different research team members, including topics such the digital memory of WWII and anti-Soviet partisans, of late Soviet Union childhood nostalgia, of the Lithuanian Holocaust, and of the ethnocultures in Lithuania. In this presentation, we illustrate relevant aspects of our approach and reflect critically on the methodological challenges and epistemic implications it entails, as memory interactions on social media turn from 'matters of fact' into 'matters of concern' at a time of increasing weaponisation of the past for neo-imperialist, xenophobic and authoritarian purposes.
description: This presentation reports on research conducted as part of "Connective digital memory in borderlands: a mixed-methods study of cultural identity, heritage communication and digital curation on social networks". The Connective project is funded by the European Social Fund under grant agreement 09.3.3-LMT-K-712-17-0027 with the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT).