Papers by Gevisa La Rocca
Intorno agli hashtag. Reti sociosemiotiche, sociolinguistiche, relazionali
Interpreting the changeable meaning of hashtags: Toward the theorization of a model
Frontiers in Sociology, 2023
This study contributes to the international debate on the hashtag's nature and characteristics an... more This study contributes to the international debate on the hashtag's nature and characteristics and attempts to define it as a relational social form affected by morphogenetic–morphostatic processes. To develop this interpretative proposal, this study uses the dimensions of time and agency, drawing on Twitter hashtag studies. Subsequently, the article recalls elements of cultural morphogenesis, traces the points of contact between hashtag studies and cultural morphogenesis, constructs an interpretative proposal of the hashtag as a relational social form, and arrives at the formalization of a model for analyzing the changing meaning of hashtags.
Free download/open access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.1104686/full
From #iononriapro to #ioapro: analysing hashtag activism in the Italian restaurant Twittersphere during the 2020 lockdown
Online Information Review, 2023
Purpose
In this article, the authors analyse the impact of the 2020 lockdown and the subsequent m... more Purpose
In this article, the authors analyse the impact of the 2020 lockdown and the subsequent measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 in Italy in the hospitality industry by looking at the social demands brought forward by the restaurant sector.
Design/methodology/approach
To analyse social demands, the authors choose Twitter as an observation point using two hashtags as keywords to scratch the data: #iononriapro and #ioapro, which correspond to two different instances conveyed by the same subject: the restaurant sector. The instances linked to the hashtags produced different levels of engagement and penetration within the social structure and digital platform. To analyse the first block of data linked to the first hashtag-flag #iononriapro, the authors used content analysis. To analyse the second and third block of data linked to the hashtag-flag #ioapro, the authors used an automatic procedure, emotional text mining.
Findings
The analysis procedures allow us to reconstruct the positioning of the topics of closures and reopenings due to lockdown in this sector and to identify two explanatory dimensions: structural and affective, which explain the tension that has emerged between the State and the restaurant sector around COVID-related closures.
Originality/value
The study's findings not only contribute to the current understandings of the birth, transformation and penetration of social issues by the restaurant sector over the specific period linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures imposed for its containment but are also valuable to analyse the dynamics through which Twitter hashtags and the social issues they represent find strength or lose interest in the public.
#Covid-19: A hashtag for examining reactions towards Europe in times of crisis. An analysis of tweets in Italian, Spanish, and French
Hashtag research has established itself as a relevant research field, with various studies having... more Hashtag research has established itself as a relevant research field, with various studies having analysed this polysemic collector in crisis and media events. Hashtags are used in social media, most specifically on Twitter. Further, between 2020 and 2021, hashtag studies linked to the COVID-19 pandemic have emerged. Accordingly, this study aimed to analyse the content of tweets during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (March 4–11, 2020) that included the hashtag #Covid-19
in three different languages: Italian, Spanish, and French. For these analyses, we used emotional text mining. The goal of this study was to reconstruct the representation of the pandemic, of containment measures, and of Europe in tweets. We discussed the prevailing attitude towards
Europe in times of crisis.
Free download/open access: https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/res/article/view/90028
Research using hashtags: A meta-synthesis
In the last 20 years, research using hashtags has grown considerably. The changes that occurred i... more In the last 20 years, research using hashtags has grown considerably. The changes that occurred in the digital environment have influenced their diffusion and development. Today, there is considerable research on hashtags, their use, and on hashtag activism. Likewise, there is a growing interest in their descriptive measures and their metrics. This article aimed to provide a review of this area of research and studies to outline the traits of hashtag research, which are yet nascent. To achieve this, we used a meta-study to produce a meta-synthesis capable of bringing out similarities and differences in research using hashtags and identifying spaces for the generation of new knowledge.
Free download/open access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.1081603/full
Sotto il profilo della affidabilità si tratta di controllare l’effettivo potere discriminante del... more Sotto il profilo della affidabilità si tratta di controllare l’effettivo potere discriminante dell’indice di negatività per il quale, in un’analisi automatica, non si può tenere conto del contesto complessivo della misura. Queste consi-derazioni metodologiche sono applicate a un corpus in lingua inglese costituito da articoli sulla Cina di quattro quotidiani del Regno Unito: The Times, The Guardian, The Independent e The Daily Telegraph dal 2000 al 2008. The positive-negative classification criterion is one of the most important to classify a text. The first studies date back to Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum (1957), with reference to the main dimensions of meaning identified in evaluation, potency and activity. Later on Boucher e Osgood formulated the well known Pollyanna hypothesis (1969). Recently Bolasco and della Ratta-Rinaldi (2004) have taken up their work on this hypothesis with the aim to build an analysis tool capable of categorizing a text moving from the presence of the eva...
Conversazioni in Mailing List: uso dell'analisi testuale per una retrospettiva dell'evoluzione del telelavoro in Italia
M@GM@, 2005
Oggetto dell'analisi sono i messaggi contenuti nell'archivio di due mailing list: 'Te... more Oggetto dell'analisi sono i messaggi contenuti nell'archivio di due mailing list: 'Telelavoro' - il telelavoro, vantaggi e rischi è il tema della mailing list del 1996; 'Telelavoro' - telelavoro Italia è invece il titolo della lista di discussione del 1998. Le tematiche di sviluppo del telelavoro si intrecciano, inevitabilmente, con quelle della società dell'informazione e della comparsa ed implementazione degli strumenti e delle infrastrutture high tech. Sembra quindi un argomento particolarmente adatto ad affidare la sua ricostruzione storica ad uno strumento di comunicazione virtuale e asincrono. L'obiettivo dell'analisi è quello di sviluppare un approccio in grado di estrarre dal testo le linee del cambiamento di opinione in merito al telelavoro, ricostruendo l'accentuarsi o attenuarsi delle differenze di genere nel corso degli anni e restituendo un'informazione sulla bontà delle discussioni affrontate all'interno di uno strumento ...
International Review of Sociology
The alarmism caused by the use of catastrophic headlines and words on major means of communicatio... more The alarmism caused by the use of catastrophic headlines and words on major means of communication as soon as the arrival of migrants along the coasts of southern European countries intensifies is a recent phenomenon. Media immediately start talking about an 'invasion', an 'emergency', even about a Barbarian conquest of Europe. Is this news well founded? And whether it contains some truth or not, what are the consequences of its 'entrance' into the homes of Europeans? The data collected by the United Nations High Commissioners for Refugees (UNHCR) on the arrivals across the Mediterranean considerably reduce this alarmism. In 2016, between January and November, 351,619 people crossed the Mediterranean Sea, risking their lives to reach Europe; butafter March 2016the number of those arriving decreased substantially (UNHCR 2016). The push to migrate from these countries (e.g. Syrian Arab Republic 23%,
Organizzare l'informazione etnografica Il ruolo dei CAQDAS
Rassegna Italiana Di Sociologia, 2009
Although software for handling textual data has been available since the mid 1960s, it was not un... more Although software for handling textual data has been available since the mid 1960s, it was not until the early 1980s that qualitative researchers discovered that the computer assist them working with their data (Kelle 1995; 2000). Today, however, their use is more widespread. In this ...
Software per l'analisi qualitativa dei testi
La prima apparizione dei software per l'analisi qualitativa si è avuta all'iniz... more La prima apparizione dei software per l'analisi qualitativa si è avuta all'inizio degli anni Sessanta, ma è stato soltanto intorno alla metà del 1980 che questi strumenti hanno preso piede e si sono affermati nelle comunità scientifiche. Di lì a poco, il rapido diffondersi delle ...
The purpose of this introduction is to set a useful frame for reading this thematic section. The ... more The purpose of this introduction is to set a useful frame for reading this thematic section. The key concepts of digital platforms, affective polarization, sharing of emotions are explored. The articles contained in this thematic section, which combine different research disciplines and techniques, provide to identify the different fields of communication within which the mediatization of emotions, the generation of affective cultures can prove to be a bearer of social, political cultural; and to outline methods and techniques for the analysis of emotions within digital platforms.
International Review of Sociology , 2021
The first months of 2020 saw the coronavirus pandemic explode. Moving from China, it arrived in E... more The first months of 2020 saw the coronavirus pandemic explode. Moving from China, it arrived in Europe and hit Italy. The place where the debate around it exploded was the media ecosystem. In a short time, it was an explosion of tweets related to the hashtag #coronavirus on Twitter. With the aim of reconstructing the meanings of the hashtag and the content, in terms of sentiment and opinions, of the reactions of the Italians, we collected in a large size corpus, the hundred thousand Italian tweets containing the #coronavirus produced during the media hype period from the Twitter repository (February 24th - 28th, 2020). Media hype period was discovered by digging in the online articles of ‘la Repubblica', based on the presence of the words: coronavirus and Italy. The media hype is February 26th. The corpus underwent Emotional Text Mining (ETM), an unsupervised methodology, which allows social profiling based on communication. The study of the word chosen to talk about a topic and their co-occurrence allows the understanding of people’s symbolizations, representations, and sentiment, about the coronavirus. In a retrospective logic, this mechanism allows us to reconstruct the sensemaking and nuances of meaning attributed by users to the coronavirus hashtag.
PaCo - Partecipazione e Conflitto http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/paco/issue/current, 2021
The article focuses on Italians' reactions to the pandemic on Twitter. During the first phase of ... more The article focuses on Italians' reactions to the pandemic on Twitter. During the first phase of the 2020 lockdown (from the beginning of March 2020-to the beginning of May 2020), a real-time dataset was built, linking data scratching to three events related to the introduction of the Prime Minister's decrees and his press conferences. The chosen observation point is Twitter, platform that allows us to monitor the emergence of discussions on public issues, extremely synchronized with events and news-which is, moreover, a feature of use of this platform. The coronavirus hashtag was chosen as a mechanism to track the development of Italian reactions, following the evolution of its sense and sensemaking and considering it as a polysemic collector. The aim is to identify within the tweets the actors, the topics, and the tone of the debate in an open public space. Furthermore, the analysis is carried out in search of the Italians' perception of the lockdown and whether they are in favor of it because of the defense of public health or they see it as a restriction of their individual freedom. The analysis, which used the socio-constructivist approach of Emotional Text Mining, reveals two explanatory-dimensions in the governance of the crisis: lockdown and breakdown and allows us to understand the reasons for Twitter's instinct-reactions.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus – declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organizati... more The SARS-CoV-2 virus – declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO) – has, among other elements, emphasized a condition of precariousness and uncertainty present in big cities. One effect of this unveiling were the escapes, the exodus that took place almost with the same intensity – obviously graded by size of the centers and states – in each nation where the epidemic wave was detected and the containment measures of the lockdown were been introduced. This short article keeps track of what has appeared in the media and what has been word of mouth about the escape from big cities as a result of the lockdown. Furthermore, it offers food for thought on this phenomenon with particular reference to what happened in Italy and above all by introducing southern dimension in the perspective of these returns. Most of the returned are students, temporary workers, members of families separated by work reasons. The speed with which these people have returned makes one think and pushes ourselves to wonder – even if it would be more appropriate to ask them – if now that lockdown is over they will go back to the North or choose to stay in own countries of origin. The background question is if they will return to places where their family does not live, in places chosen only to try to improve their economic conditions, attempt social mobility or for attend university, or if this escape caused by the pandemic has produced/will produce biographical transitions. Was the pandemic a turning point? Have we all learned something from it or are we going back on the same path? Will this pandemic crisis produce regeneration or relegation? It is still too early to have got the answers to these questions, but we can say that, these escapes brought out: the precariousness and uncertainty of big cities, the role and importance of the family in times of difficulty, the possible consequences of the pandemic on people’s lives.
BARATARIA, 2020
RESUMEN
Los hashtags representan una forma extremadamente simple, utilizada por las redes sociale... more RESUMEN
Los hashtags representan una forma extremadamente simple, utilizada por las redes sociales, para conectar noticias, temas, personas, emociones, eventos. Si en el primer período fue posible considerarlos exclusivamente como agregadores temáticos, ahora es necesario preguntarnos en qué se han convertido. Al analizar diferentes perspectivas teóricas, este artículo tiene como objetivo llegar a una reformulación de la definición del término y del concepto hashtag.
PALABRAS CLAVE
Acto lingüístico; creación de conocimiento; hashtag; ofrecimientos; simulacro.
- EN -
ABSTRACT
Hashtags represent an extremely simple way, used within the social network, to connect news, topics, people, emotions, events. If in the first period - it was possible - to consider them exclusively as thematic aggregators now it is necessary to ask ourselves what they have become. By analyzing different theoretical perspectives, this article aims to arrive at a definition of the term and concept of hashtag.
KEYWORDS
Speech acts; Hashtag; Knowledge creation; Affordances; Simulacrum.
Culture e Studi del Sociale-CuSSoc, 2020
The aim of the article is to identify themes, actors and mood of the tweets shared by users in th... more The aim of the article is to identify themes, actors and mood of the tweets shared by users in the period from March 25 to April 3, 2020 in Italy. It seems an extremely delicate and complex period, because it corresponds to the first phase of the lockdown, introduced following the Covid-19 pandemic. It was a period characterized by emergency and crisis, with nuances related to fear and uncertainty. We assumed that this situation could have influenced and produced effects on the ideologically oriented digital language practice. Taking this background into consideration, we have scraped the messages containing the surnames of the Italian Premier and the one of the opposition leader from Twitter, in order to identify the debate connected to them and to the crisis. To achieve this goal, we performed a computational linguistic technique, Emotinal Text Mining. The first result reconstructs the landscape of the debate. Arising topics-scape drawn by: the leader, the players, the economy, the entertainment, the politic, the skill, and the guilt. Then, representations were identified and sentiments measured.
ALGORITMI E BIG DATA: VECCHIE E NUOVE QUESTIONI NELLA PLATFORM SOCIETY RIFLESSIONI A MARGINE SULLA RICERCA IN COMUNICAZIONE
Comunicazionepuntodoc, 2020
La ricerca con e sui big data apre numerose questioni: alcune vecchie e altre nuove. Esse riguard... more La ricerca con e sui big data apre numerose questioni: alcune vecchie e altre nuove. Esse riguardano i modelli di estrazione dell’informazione, la black box degli algoritmi, le procedure di analisi, l’applicazione di metodi e di tecniche di ricerca provenienti da altri paradigmi nell’ecosistema mediale connesso, i rischi cui incorre un ricercatore sociale mentre fa ricerca mediante essi. Si tratta di questioni che ieri come oggi interessano i ricercatori sociali, i quali sono chiamati a rispondere tenendo in considerazione il contesto all’interno del quale queste tracce digitali sono prodotte, la natura dei dati con i quali si confrontano e la necessità di indagare i “perché”.
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EN
Research with and on big data opens up several questions: some old and some new. They concern: information extraction models, algorithm black boxes, analysis procedures, application of research methods and techniques - born into other paradigms – in the connected media eco system, the risks associated with their use in social research. These are questions, which yesterday as today, are of interest to social researchers, who are called to answer by taking into consideration the context within which these digital traces are produced, the nature of the data with whom they are confronted, and the need to investigate the “whys”.
In recent years hashtag studies have increased their numbers. The role of hashtags becomes increa... more In recent years hashtag studies have increased their numbers. The role of hashtags becomes increasingly predominant in social media studies. Many researchers wonder how to study them, ending up treating them in an aggregate way and turning to big data and static-mathematical modeling. This type of studies seem to consider hashtags as tools, favoring a single analysis perspective. In fact, The studies and the research carried out in the field of social media deal with what users do with hashtags. This paper wishes to propose a different perspective. The question raised here is not "what users do with hashtags," but "what they do to hashtags." This theoretical approach presupposes a change in the perspective based on the reading of hashtags as speech acts, which impacts the construction of social reality and identifies hashtags as cultural products. This interpretative path of cultural nature seems to be necessary in order to be able to look at the hashtag as a concept that changes its meaning through human interaction. The consequence of inserting this perspective is that the hashtag becomes a multidimensional concept, which in order to be analyzed must be decomposed and analyzed in all its possible dimensions. If the aim of the research is to reconstruct the sense and meaning of the hashtag.
The Media Resonance of the Event. Analyzing on Twitter the Resignation and Election of the Popes
Problemi dell'informazione, 2019
Digital media allow the diffusion and discussion of religious contents and sentiments going beyon... more Digital media allow the diffusion and discussion of religious contents and sentiments going beyond the doors of the Church, changing the ways in which religious institutions interact with their communities, realizing the mediatization of religion. The use of social media contributes to redesigning the authority of religious institutions and the expression of the affective publics. The aim of this paper is to investigate the range of emotions of the Twitter’s hashtags of Pope Francis and Benedict XVI, in order to reconstruct the emotional range linked to resignations and elections events in 2013. This events are treated as a case study, which requires multiple analysis techniques: textual data analysis, content analysis, sentiment analysis. The analysis show how has been generated a set of conversations that contain elements related to secularization and that, at the same time, act as a testimony of a process of desecularization that participate in the construction of a context of banal religion.
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Papers by Gevisa La Rocca
Free download/open access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.1104686/full
In this article, the authors analyse the impact of the 2020 lockdown and the subsequent measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 in Italy in the hospitality industry by looking at the social demands brought forward by the restaurant sector.
Design/methodology/approach
To analyse social demands, the authors choose Twitter as an observation point using two hashtags as keywords to scratch the data: #iononriapro and #ioapro, which correspond to two different instances conveyed by the same subject: the restaurant sector. The instances linked to the hashtags produced different levels of engagement and penetration within the social structure and digital platform. To analyse the first block of data linked to the first hashtag-flag #iononriapro, the authors used content analysis. To analyse the second and third block of data linked to the hashtag-flag #ioapro, the authors used an automatic procedure, emotional text mining.
Findings
The analysis procedures allow us to reconstruct the positioning of the topics of closures and reopenings due to lockdown in this sector and to identify two explanatory dimensions: structural and affective, which explain the tension that has emerged between the State and the restaurant sector around COVID-related closures.
Originality/value
The study's findings not only contribute to the current understandings of the birth, transformation and penetration of social issues by the restaurant sector over the specific period linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures imposed for its containment but are also valuable to analyse the dynamics through which Twitter hashtags and the social issues they represent find strength or lose interest in the public.
in three different languages: Italian, Spanish, and French. For these analyses, we used emotional text mining. The goal of this study was to reconstruct the representation of the pandemic, of containment measures, and of Europe in tweets. We discussed the prevailing attitude towards
Europe in times of crisis.
Free download/open access: https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/res/article/view/90028
Free download/open access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.1081603/full
Los hashtags representan una forma extremadamente simple, utilizada por las redes sociales, para conectar noticias, temas, personas, emociones, eventos. Si en el primer período fue posible considerarlos exclusivamente como agregadores temáticos, ahora es necesario preguntarnos en qué se han convertido. Al analizar diferentes perspectivas teóricas, este artículo tiene como objetivo llegar a una reformulación de la definición del término y del concepto hashtag.
PALABRAS CLAVE
Acto lingüístico; creación de conocimiento; hashtag; ofrecimientos; simulacro.
- EN -
ABSTRACT
Hashtags represent an extremely simple way, used within the social network, to connect news, topics, people, emotions, events. If in the first period - it was possible - to consider them exclusively as thematic aggregators now it is necessary to ask ourselves what they have become. By analyzing different theoretical perspectives, this article aims to arrive at a definition of the term and concept of hashtag.
KEYWORDS
Speech acts; Hashtag; Knowledge creation; Affordances; Simulacrum.
---
EN
Research with and on big data opens up several questions: some old and some new. They concern: information extraction models, algorithm black boxes, analysis procedures, application of research methods and techniques - born into other paradigms – in the connected media eco system, the risks associated with their use in social research. These are questions, which yesterday as today, are of interest to social researchers, who are called to answer by taking into consideration the context within which these digital traces are produced, the nature of the data with whom they are confronted, and the need to investigate the “whys”.