Framing

Structure

This museum is seen as a web museum in the communicational sense, which means, as an informative platform developing activities of research and divulging, having as privileged addressees the emigrants, descendants and associations, involving scholars who focus their works in this thematic area, in a descriptive, analytical, interactive logic and in a web, giving more importance to individuals, contexts, memories, having as privileged resource the new technologies.

Social Sciences, when integrating the new technologies, widened the scope of its methodological procedures, giving to the technique a new sense. Thus we get to a new concept: the techno science. This framing integrated the technique in the scope of the methods of the bibliographical documentary and experimental research, as much in the qualitative perspective as in the quantitative one, linking the sources, the known information and knowledge.

The techno science makes the technique change from the resource or complement scope to the one of determinative in the scientific processes  that can be descriptive, of illustration, as well as the clarifying ones of the quantitative nature. For this last one, the databases and the different forms of graphical representation will have its application, as well as those which combine with the structures space time, in an interactive and web  system, allowing its simultaneous conjugation.

The new technologies are a reflex of the analysis structures and influence the conceptual approaches of social sciences, inscribing them, simultaneously, in the scopes of the research processes and communication. In fact, social sciences, museum science and communication construct complementary multiple meanings, making it possible to use methodologies of environment and places reconstitution, and virtual visits, as well as methodologies that are centred in the analysis and cataloguing of museum material and its respective documents museum and historically valuable.

Simultaneously, there are the perspective of the researcher and different social sciences, and the perspective of the users of the platform, constructing a process of reading autonomously, linking, in a web, known information, perspectives and visitors,  who can participate and interact directly in the knowledge.

Finally, the web museum is organized as follows: Museum Archive, Museum House, Nuclei and Historical Sites, where the particularities of emigration and/or return are focused, taking into account the origin city, and having the following dimensions: 

• Webmuseum, as a communicational museum, functions in the Thematic Rooms and considers the divulging and animation in a web having, so far, the following assignments: ?Room of the Diaspora? [The Auto–Biography, Biographies, Emigrants Biographies ]; ?Room of the Ancestry? [Genealogies, History of families]; ?Room of the Memory "[ Region of Origin, Memories of Trip, Destinations of Emigration, Return in the Portuguese Culture, Nuclei and Museum Sites]; ?Room of Knowledge; ?Room of the Communities? [Of Emigrants, Immigrants, Dislocated, Refugees ]; ?Room of the Portuguese Language and Culture? [Territory, Colonies and Decolonisation ].

• The Historical Archive consists in the basis of the written documentary sources coming from public or private registers: letters, personal diaries, photographs, shipment manifests of passengers; registers of granted passports, exits and entrances in another country; the authorizations of residence or work attributed there; the collective contract acts of foreign workmanship; at last, all the censuses, lists or simple counting that are related to immigrated people, as precious elements in a museum of migrations.

All the document categories systematically collected and filed have increased importance, as they supply tracks, as much for the localization of individual references as they are the food of the scientific research.

• The Museum House, as a Historical museum, is an Interpretative Centre, which is the reference of the Museum of Emigration structured in reconstitution rooms of the origin, travel, migration and return experience.

In this interpretative centre there will be the documental and museum material; it will be located in Fafe.

There will be personal objects reconstituting the atmosphere linked to the daily routine of the family and showing, to a certain extent, the migratory process and social mobility.

The building is important for its location, its architectural characteristics, the decoration of the interior and respective furniture, as well as the history of the Family of the Brazilian, in public and private contexts.

The most significant expressions of the XIX and first half of XX century Portuguese culture must be visible. Therefore, there is no necessity to reinvent the past, but only the desire to provide it with the possible readings in an open perspectives picture, taking into account the diversity of the visitors as addressees.

• The Museum Nuclei and Historical Sites exist, basically, thanks to the Room of the Memory and they constitute physical thematic places, organizing a polynuclear museum, drawn for the valuation of the museum material and memory that is associated to them.

In Fafe, a case which was  already studied, the nuclei show the material and symbolic expressions of the cycle of Emigration and Return to and from Brazil; these expressions are a reference for the construction of the museum nuclei: Hydroelectric-power of Saint Rita; of the Arts; of the Press; of the Philanthropy; Industrial; of the Public Walk; of the Brazilian’s House; of the Instruction; of the Automobile.

• The Services are managed in the virtual platform, in which a national approach of the phenomenon of the Emigration is more adequate, and in the cultural and educative services of the nuclei.

These are one of the foundations of the museum, for livening up its activities and being associated to the contents of the Thematic Rooms.

The main services are: planning, execution and spreading of the activities; support to the ancestry discovery; information on the origin territories; interchanges, contacts and organization of activities of spreading; linking to the knowledge centres; collection and documentary organization of scientific works and bibliography; organization of temporary exhibitions of an educative and cultural nature.