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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Methodology and Methods for Analysing Websites

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This chapter describes the methodology, methods, and analytical schemes developed for and applied to the case study of the contrade of Siena. It presents no general research design, but, rather, demonstrates a possible method for designing one. The author suggests that “virtual ethnography” and “Netnography ” provide convincing methodological foundations for the establishment of research designs that can be combined with a phenomenological theoretical perspective. However, these approaches do not offer a satisfying methodology to analysing the content of the web pages, and therefore a possible content analysis, based on ideas from the semiotics of pragmatism, as developed by Peirce and his successors, is given. This chapter demonstrates that a website must be interpreted in its sociocultural-technological-material context to be fully understood.