Investigating digital campaigns on new developments in Edinburgh's Historic Centre: online discourses and sense of place

Abstract

This thesis explores the attitudes and relations created by digital communications and social media interactions, this is done using qualitative methods, in opposition to the quantitative ones most used to research data coming from social and digital media. The intention of this research is to find and describe the connections between people and organisations as they appear on the Internet. Three urban and architectural development projects that affected the structure of the heritage urban area of Edinburgh, Scotland, were used as case studies to investigate those connections in significance to notions of urban planning and heritage conservation.

The research is supported with both digital and field research using participant observation and other qualitative methods with ethnographic forms of data mining. Using those two kinds of research, digital and traditional, Internet communications and real-life interactions gave the data that was held to evaluation to test its usability as a good source of information for researching people and organisation relations in urban heritage conservation.

The data analysed and the research process showed that the guiding principle of the exposed relations was the intention of influencing the “sense of place” to support different discourses related to how people experience or expect to experience urban historical areas. For this reason, concepts of human geography are the starting point to help explain the utility of the collected data, especially for heritage conservation, urban planning, and spatial humanities.