One area of PaSTIS’s research activities concerns the presence of science and technology in the public sphere, with a focus on the media arena. The role of technoscience in contemporary society which often takes on a controversial character-is analyzed through text-mining and automated content analysis techniques that monitor the daily press, blogs and social media. Especially through the Technoscientific Issues in the Public Sphere (TIPS) project, great emphasis is being placed on the big data perspective, so as to take advantage of the increasing availability of large amounts of data made available by new digital collection and processing tools, some of which are specially developed by the TIPS web-platform.

Research activity in this area is developed along three axes:

•           New Frontiers of Technoscientific Research: the social implications related to the evolution of emerging areas of scientific research-such as, for example, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, augmented reality, biotechnology, and robotics-are analyzed through the study of current trends in public opinion (using data collected mainly through surveys) and the monitoring of their media coverage;
•           Science and technology in the media: the second direction of research focuses on the evolution of representations of science and technology in the media, both with respect to point themes and in relation to the long-term evolution of the role in science in public debate. The study of social representations through the media considers both traditional media-such as print and television-as well as digital communication and social network streams. The main research project is called TIPS – Technoscientific Issues in the Public Sphere.
•           Technoscientific controversies: given their growing importance, the mapping and study of public controversies related to technoscience constitute a specific area of interest: from the now-classic topic of controversy around biotechnology to that of climate change and artificial intelligence, to the debates developing around large infrastructures and engineering works, especially with regard to local and national spillovers on innovation governance processes.

Projects

TIPS (Technoscientific Issues in the Public Sphere).

Visualizing Science on Screen

Discourses, promises and expectations about Artificial Intelligence

Contact Person 

Federico Neresini 

Paolo Giardullo