The exploratory and interdisciplinary nature of the research we propose forces us to use social sciences’ methodologies, such as Documentation, Archive Science linked to electronic documents, Communication and Journalism, as well as emerging methods of digital history, borderline between IT, communication and historiographical techniques. Despite the challenges and complexities faced with this type of research, we understand that those challenges must be taken on in order to gain greater knowledge. One of the most relevant challenges is the constant tracking and classification of digital resources that has forced us to keep up empirical work tasks since the project was first developed three years ago.
The methodological design is descriptive and organisational in a first stage, centred on analysis in a second stage, and devoted to interpretation and dissemination in the third one. A cross-cutting task of this design is the constant search, tracking, selection and integration of digital resources in the databases that will be created to that end. This is due to the fact that the different web players keep increasing their activities on the web, that this is an environment of participatory societies, and bearing in mind that we are talking about periods that are very close to our times as is the case of the Transition to Democracy.
The methodology we will follow will be:
1. Development of taxonomy with keywords on the Transition to Democracy to enable searches, identification, selection and description of the digital sources to be studied. To that end, specific browsers and Web Crawler will be used to enable in-depth search of places on the Internet. Thus, we will obtain a corpus of digital materials presented as a new source and available in Open Access.
2. Creation of a database in Open Access similar to the one of the previous project (http://evi.linhd.uned.es/projects/hismedi/om/) to include the new registries and virtual environments.
3. Creation of a website conceived as the place for internal and external interaction and for the dissemination of resources, sources and results.
4. Analysis of the structure, authorship and content of digital elements using different software and methodological techniques depending on the sources.
a. Text mining in order to extract content from digital sources. Iramuteq software (http://www.iramuteq.org/) provides the necessary tools to do this.
b. Content analysis to study formats with greater amounts of text - websites and blogs -.
c. Use of tools to explore Twitter and Facebook.
d. Use of the MyNews database (https://www.mynews.es/) to explore most-read media and media with a large number of users.
e. Historical method to collect sources, to synthesise and analyse.