“Italy, for example, is just incredibly stupid now”. European crisis narrations in relation to Italy’s response to COVID-19

in Frontiers in Communication (2022)

Crisis narratives shape public understanding and, consequently, the response to the crisis itself. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, when in February 2020 Italy was experiencing more cases than any ... [more ▼]

Crisis narratives shape public understanding and, consequently, the response to the crisis itself. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, when in February 2020 Italy was experiencing more cases than any other country, the Italian response to the crisis originated debates over how to best respond to the outbreak. Informed by Critical Discourse Analysis theory and using narrative networks as a framework for the critical analysis of narratives, this study analyzes the discourse strategies employed by experts, politicians and other social actors from Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the UK when presenting their domestic measures in relation to Italy's response to coronavirus. The analysis shows that the narratives attached to nation-specific decisions were highly culturalized and connected to country-specific shared experiences, such as a sense of national exceptionalism built in opposition with the denigration of Italy as the Other-identity. Attribution of blame and blameworthiness was also found to be a common pattern across countries according to which Italians were framed as wrongdoers but also as deserving blame. The article also presents a comprehensive “timeline of narratives” which opens avenues for a critical reflection on the impact such narratives may have had on the understanding of the crisis, including the creation of a negative climate of division and inappropriate crisis responses. [less ▲]

DeXTER: A post-authentic approach to heritage visualisation

Scientific Conference (2022)

Cultural heritage institutions and academics are resorting more and more to visual representations of cultural heritage material as a way to enhance access to collections for users’ appreciation and ... [more ▼]

Cultural heritage institutions and academics are resorting more and more to visual representations of cultural heritage material as a way to enhance access to collections for users’ appreciation and research purposes (Windhager et al., 2019). However, scholars have pointed out (Drucker, 2011; 2013; 2014; 2020; Windhager et al., 2019) how a critical approach to visualisation is still largely missing and how on the whole, user-interface (UI) design still shows a functional and task-driven approach, oriented towards satisfying a need for information rather than towards eliciting curiosity, engagement and reflection. With this presentation, I aim to contribute to the urgent need for the establishment of a critical data and visualisation literacy in current task-driven approaches to interface design which continue to see the user as a consumer and to operate within a problem solver model. Drawing on critical posthumanities (Braidotti, 2017; 2019), I here propose a critical framework to digital cultural heritage and digital cultural heritage visualisation. With this approach —which I labelled “postauthentic framework” (Viola, 2021) —I want to initiate a discussion and critique of the fetishization of empriricism and technical objectivity in digital knowledge creation. To exemplify how the post-authentic framework works in practice, I present the design choices for developing the tool DeXTER – DeepteXTminER, an interactive visualisation app to explore enriched cultural heritage material. The discussion will revolve around the challenges facing product design, with specific reference to visualising the ambiguities and uncertainties of network analysis (NA) and sentiment analysis (SA). DeXTER is currently loaded with Chroniclitaly 3.0 (Viola and Fiscarelli, 2021a), a digital heritage collection of Italian American newspapers published in the USA by Italian immigrants between 1897 and 1936. [less ▲]

Using word vector models to trace conceptual change over time and space in historical newspapers, 1840–1914

in Digital Humanities Quarterly (2022), 16(2),

Linking large digitized newspaper corpora in different languages that have become available in national and state libraries opens up new possibilities for the computational analysis of patterns of ... [more ▼]

Linking large digitized newspaper corpora in different languages that have become available in national and state libraries opens up new possibilities for the computational analysis of patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries. The significant contribution this article presents is to demonstrate how word vector models can be used to explore the way concepts have shifted in meaning over time, as they migrated across space, by comparing newspapers from different countries published between 1840 and 1914. We define a concept, rather pragmatically, as a key term or core idea that has been used in historical discourse: an abstraction or mental representation that has served as a building block for thoughts and beliefs. We use historical newspapers in English, Finnish, German and Swedish from collections in the UK, US, Germany, and Finland, as well as the Europeana collection. As use cases, we analyze how the different conceptual constructs of “nation” and “illness” emerged and changed between 1840 and 1920. Conceptual change over time is simulated by creating a series of overlapping word vector models, each spanning ten years. Historical vocabularies are retrieved on the basis of vector space proximity. Conceptual change across space is simulated by comparing the historical change of vocabularies in newspaper collections from different nations in several languages. This computational approach to conceptual history opens up new ways to identify patterns in public discourse over longer periods of time and across borders. [less ▲]

The Importance of Being Digital (keynote)

in Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Computational History (HistoInformatics 2021) co-located with ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2021 (JCDL 2021) (2021)

ChroniclItaly 3.0. A deep-learning, contextually enriched digital heritage collection of Italian immigrant newspapers published in the USA 1898-1936.

Textual, factual or bibliographical database (2021)

Make Italy great again. Trump’s echo and discursive manipulations in Salvini’s end of the year Facebook speech

in Breeze, Ruth; Llamas, carmen (Eds.) Metaphor in politics and populism (2020)

The strategic use of the so-called new media has become more and more central to the way in which politicians, especially populist exponents, reach out to their audiences. Perhaps due to their immediate ... [more ▼]

The strategic use of the so-called new media has become more and more central to the way in which politicians, especially populist exponents, reach out to their audiences. Perhaps due to their immediate and widespread resonance, social media platforms have proven to be particularly well-suited to the way populist messages are shaped. Their impact seems to be highly effective even beyond the geographical and cultural borders of the audience the messages are originally conceived for. This article analyses the discursive strategies and use of metaphors in the end-of-the-year speech of the Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, which was broadcasted on Facebook on 31 December 2018. Using methods of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the investigation shows how Salvini uses the WAR, SPORT, FAMILY, and RELIGION metaphors as well as THE PROUD ITALIAN, THE ROBIN HOOD, and THE RESCUER scenarios to construct a Eurosceptic narrative in which his party has finally redeemed Italy from a disastrous past and liberated the nation from an oppressive Europe. The analysis will also reveal echoes of Trump’s slogan ‘Make America great again’ which Salvini uses to redefine Italy’s role in the European context as the continent’s rescuer. [less ▲]

Replication, evaluation and quantitative analysis in the DH era: Transparent digital practices and lessons learned from the development of the GeoNewsMiner

Scientific Conference (2020)

Visualising changes in the construction of meaning with Word Vector Space: A Digital Humanities Approach

Software (2020)

One hundred years of migration discourse in The Times: A discourse-historical word vector space approach to the construction of meaning

in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2020), 3(64),

This study proposes an experimental method to trace the historical evolution of media discourse as a means to investigate the construction of collective meaning. Based on distributional semantics theory ... [more ▼]

This study proposes an experimental method to trace the historical evolution of media discourse as a means to investigate the construction of collective meaning. Based on distributional semantics theory (Harris, 1954; Firth, 1957) and critical discourse theory (Wodak and Fairclough, 1997), it explores the value of merging two techniques widely employed to investigate language and meaning in two separate fields: neural word embeddings (computational linguistics) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA; Reisigl and Wodak, 2001) (applied linguistics). As a use case, we investigate the historical changes in the semantic space of public discourse of migration in the United Kingdom, and we use the Times Digital Archive (TDA) from 1900 to 2000 as dataset. For the computational part, we use the publicly available TDA word2vec models1 (Kenter et al., 2015; Martinez-Ortiz et al., 2016); these models have been trained according to sliding time windows with the specific intention to map conceptual change. We then use DHA to triangulate the results generated by the word vector models with social and historical data to identify plausible explanations for the changes in the public debate. By bringing the focus of the analysis to the level of discourse, with this method, we aim to go beyond mapping different senses expressed by single words and to add the currently missing sociohistorical and sociolinguistic depth to the computational results. The study rests on the foundation that social changes will be reflected in changes in public discourse (Couldry, 2008). Although correlation does not prove direct causation, we argue that historical events, language, and meaning should be considered as a mutually reinforcing cycle in which the language used to describe events shapes explicit meanings, which in turn trigger other events, which again will be reflected in the public discourse. [less ▲]

Polentone vs terrone: a historical corpus-based analysis of media representation of Italian internal migration

in Viola, Lorella; Musolff, Andreas (Eds.) Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis (2019)

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration ... [more ▼]

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians’ speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian – , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy. [less ▲]