Wedding Dresses and Wanted Criminals: Pinterest.com as an Infrastructure for Repository Building

We present findings from a qualitative study of activity on Pinterest.com, in which we investigated professional and personal uses of the site using interview data and observations of online activity. We find that Pinterest serves as an infrastructure for repository building that supports a wide range of activities including: discovery, collecting, collaborating, and publishing. We discuss these concepts using the language of “boundary objects” from the sociology of science. We suggest that scale is a critical dimension of boundary objects for understanding how people make sense of Pinterest and their diverse goals for using it. Profession- als often attempt to use Pinterest to create repositories that scale to groups, organizations and societies and interface with multiple social worlds whereas personal repositories often have highly localized meanings. Our approach builds on quantitative descriptions of Pinterest to understand how the site fits into a growing ecology of social network sites.

[1]  B. Schmeichel,et al.  Collectors and Collecting: A Social Psychological Perspective , 2004 .

[2]  Jacek Gwizdka,et al.  Personal information management , 2004, CHI EA '04.

[3]  Melissa Terras.  The Digital Wunderkammer: Flickr as a Platform for Amateur Cultural and Heritage Content , 2011, Libr. Trends.

[4]  James Caverlee,et al.  A Large-Scale Study of MySpace: Observations and Implications for Online Social Networks , 2021, ICWSM.

[5]  A. Young.  Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. , 2001 .

[6]  C. Tilley,et al.  Handbook of Material Culture , 2006 .

[7]  Mark W. Newman,et al.  Listening in: practices surrounding iTunes music sharing , 2005, CHI.

[8]  Lee Rainie.  A Biography of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project , 2012 .

[9]  Nicholas Christakis,et al.  The Taste for Privacy: An Analysis of College Student Privacy Settings in an Online Social Network , 2008, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[10]  William E. Jones,et al.  Context in information behavior research , 2007 .

[11]  L. Barsalou,et al.  Ad hoc categories , 1983, Memory & cognition.

[12]  David Coyle,et al.  ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2014, International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

[13]  Susan Leigh Star,et al.  Institutional Ecology, `Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39 , 1989 .

[14]  V. Braun,et al.  Using thematic analysis in psychology , 2006 .

[15]  A. Strauss,et al.  The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research aldine de gruyter , 1968 .

[16]  S. L. Star,et al.  This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept , 2010 .

[17]  Michael A. Zarro,et al.  Exploring Social Curation , 2012, D Lib Mag..

[18]  Saeideh Bakhshi,et al.  "I need to try this"?: a statistical overview of pinterest , 2013, CHI.

[19]  T. Oko.  Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences. , 1992 .

[20]  John F. Sherry,et al.  Collectors and Collecting , 2019, The Spanish Craze.

[21]  Eszter Hargittai,et al.  Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites , 2007, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[22]  Christian Wolff,et al.  Personal Information Management vs. Resource Sharing: Towards a Model of Information Behaviour in Social Tagging Systems , 2009, ICWSM 2009.

[23]  Michael A. Zarro,et al.  Social curation on the website Pinterest.com , 2012, ASIST.

[24]  A. Schutz.  The phenomenology of the social world , 1967 .