Digital resources, methods and tools in the research lifecycle: the Connective Digital Memory in the Borderlands project

Social media networks have become an increasingly important domain for community interactions and institutional interventions regarding cultural heritage and collective memory, with implications for contemporary identities and attitudes. In the CONNECTIVE Digital Memory in the Borderlands Project, we worked to reveal how memory practices on Lithuanian Social Network sites mediated by contested heritage shape cultural identities at across communities. The work of our multidisciplinary team depends crucially on systematic use of digital resources, methods and tools across all stages of the research lifecycle: from a systematic review of relevant literature and the conceptualization of the domain under investigation, to the constitution of our data infrastructure, selection of data from social media conversations, data constitution, analysis and interpretation. We built a domain model (ontology) and property graph schema,  and established a digital data archive using Neo4J graph database to represent over 30,000 social media conversations, their semiotic content, and related users and context in the form of knowledge graphs. We also used MaxQDA for qualitative content coding, analysis, interpretation, and theory building.  In this poster presentation, we outline the use of digital methods and tools used for  our systematic integrative literature review, and for formal conceptualization, research data constitution and management, coding, analysis and theory-building in our research. On this basis, we also reflect on methodological and theoretical implications and challenges encountered while employing digitally-enabled research on a research topic spanning the fields of cultural heritage, memory, and communication studies, thus transcending the boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities.