The following two contributions have been accepted at AIUCD2017, the 6th conference of Associazione per lInformatica Umanistica e le Culture Digitali (AIUCD):
- Twitter Data Exploration for Italian History by Rachele Sprugnoli, Giovanni Moretti and Sara Tonelli.
Abstract: Social media texts are a specific type of big data and, as such, constitute a socio-technical phenomenon with great potentials but also methodological and conceptual challenges. In the History domain, social media can be seen as primary sources useful to study contemporary events, as well as to understand the way ordinary people engage with the past. To this end, in this work we present an adaptation of the MARTIN tool for Twitter analysis to the History domain. In particular, we show how, starting from a pre-defined list of accounts dealing with history-related topics, it is possible to understand what main historical events are mentioned, how they are presented and in which contexts they are discussed.
- Religious and gender issues through the lens of a TV series: Watching OITNB by Mariachiara Giorda, Giovanni Moretti, Boris Rähme, Marco Stranisci, Sara Tonelli, Federica Turco.
Abstract: In this work, we present an analysis of the widely followed TV series Orange is the New Black (OITNB), a US-American comedy-drama produced by Netflix, which tells the stories and the problems of a group of female prison inmates. Its importance is due to two factors: first, OITNB has been, and continues to be, very successful, attracting large audiences and having broad impact. Second, it focuses on topics that are crucial for super-diverse societies (Becci, Burchardt and Giorda, 2015), such as gender, spirituality, and ethnic minorities. In what follows, we provide a multidisciplinary analysis of these cultural and social aspects, bringing together an NLP-approach with perspectives from semiotics and religious studies. In particular, we describe how these issues are represented in OITNB, comparing the outcome of an automatic analysis of subtitles, reviews, and fan-discussions with a semiotic interpretation of the series content and with recent work in the sociology of monastic institutions.
The conference will be held from January 26th to 28th in Rome, Italy.
