TECHNOSCIENTIFIC ISSUES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE (TIPS)

TIPS project has been conceived for the development, experimentation and implementation of automatic procedures for gathering, classifying and analysis of contents available on the web. Concentrating mainly, but not only, on daily newspapers and social media the main aim is to monitor quantitatively the presence of technoscience and to analyse the qualitative evolution of public discourse about science and technology.

For these reasons TIPS grew as an interdisciplinary project involving since the beginning different expertise: besides sociology, the research group enjoy the contributions computer science, social psychology, statistics and linguistics.

TIPS is grounded on a purpose-built ICT infrastructure. Its design includes a dedicated platform capable of collecting, sorting and automatically analysing the text of newspaper articles in their digital format.

It monitors the eight most important Italian newspapers, in a time span ranging from 2010 to yesterday. In 2014 the TIPS platform also began collecting UK, US, French, Spanish, Russian and Latin-American daily newspapers. Through automated text analysis techniques TIPS calculates ad-hoc ‘indicators’ based on more than 2.6 million of documents such as ‘salience’, ‘prominence’ and ‘presence’ of technoscience.

Pubblication

Crabu S., Giardullo P., Sciandra A., Neresini F. (2021). Politics overwhelms science in the Covid-19 pandemic: Evidence from the whole coverage of the Italian quality newspapers. PLoS ONE 16(5): e0252034. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252034

Neresini, F., Crabu, S., & Di Buccio, E. (2019). Tracking biomedicalization in the media: Public discourses on health and medicine in the UK and Italy, 1984–2017. Social Science & Medicine, 243, 112621.

Neresini F., Giardullo P., Di Buccio E., Cammozzo A. (2019). Exploring socio-technical future scenarios in the media: the energy transition case in Italian daily newspapers. QUALITY & QUANTITY, ISSN: 0033-5177, doi: 10.1007/s11135-019-00947-w

Giardullo P., (2019). Spreading mosquitoes: a media analysis of Italian national newspaper coverage of mosquito-borne diseases and related interventions. In: (a cura di): Cecilia Claeys, Mosquitoes management: Environmental issues and health concerns. pp. 84-111, Bruxelles:Peter Lang, ISBN: 978-2-8076-0243-4

Neresini F. (2017) «Old media and new opportunities for a computational social science on PCST», in JCOM – JOURNAL OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATION, 16(2) C03_en [ISSN 1824-2049]

Di Buccio E., Lorenzet A., Melucci M., and Neresini F. (2016) «Unveiling latent states behind social indicators», in Proceedings of the First Workshop on Data Science for Social Good co-located with European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles & Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, SoGood@ECML-PKDD 2016, Riva del Garda, Italy, September 19, 2016. (R. Gavaldà, I. Zliobaite, and J. Gama, eds.), vol. 1831 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org

Giardullo P., Neresini F. (2015) «La governance della produzione alimentare nel dibattito pubblico italiano», in AMMINISTRARE, XLV, 2-3, pp.205-233.

Neresini F., Lorenzet A. (2014) «Can media monitoring be a proxy for public opinion about technoscientific controversies? The case of the Italian public debate on nuclear power», in PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE, online 6.10.14, DOI: 10.1177/0963662514551506

Lorenzet, A., & Neresini, F. (2014). Quando il futuro diventa rilevante. Vent’anni di discorso pubblico sull’innovazione in Italia. Polis, 28(3), pp. 339-364.

Research Area: Technoscientific Issues in the Public Sphere