What ’ s lit got to do with it ? Deconstructing the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site
traveling Route 66 by investigating a number of data sets including interviews , narrative inquiry , and photo elicitation . Similarly , Chronis ( 375 ) used a deconstructive methodology to examine how tourists to the Gettysburg Civil War site derived heritage meaning . Despite its potential , few tourism scholars have used deconstruction as a research methodology . Though underused by tourism scholars , deconstruction is well suited for examining tourist opinions , given that tourism places are often wrought with various signs and symbols created specifically to be read or interpreted by tourists ( Waterton and Watson 110 ).
Data Collection�eWOM
To deconstruct the experiences of visitors to the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site , visitor-generated feedback posted to the travel review website TripAdvisor was collected . Given that the home has been under construction since 2016 and was therefore not accessible to tourists , data was collected reflecting visitors ’ experiences prior to the start of the recent restoration project ( i . e ., prior to June 2016 ). Reviews were available as far back as October 7 , 2007 , and all reviews were collected for examination . In total , 257 reviews were in the data set .
Electronic word of mouth or eWOM is user-created data , usually written by a contributor ( with little to no reward for posting feedback ) and has become a popular way for tourists to investigate aspects of a destination before and during their visit , and to report back about their experience ( see Catallops and Salvi 43 ; Livtin et al . 460 ). Scholars , noting the availability of eWOM reviews and its ability to reflect visitors ’ thoughts in ( close to ) real time , have looked to various eWOM resources to examine how visitors conceptualize destinations ( see , for example , Leung et al . 127 ), to explore the
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