Old media and new opportunities for a computational social science on PCST

Abstract

Although with some reluctance, social sciences now seem to have accepted the challenge deriving from the growing digitisation of communication and the consequent flow of data on the web. There are actually various empirical studies that use the digital traces left by the myriads of interactions that occur through social media and e-commerce platforms, and this trend also concerns the research in the PCST field. However, the opportunity offered by the digitisation of traditional mass media communication -the newspapers in particular -is much less exploited. Building on the experience of the TIPS project, this paper discusses the advantages and the limits of computational social science on PCST using newspapers as the main source of data. Some methodological issues are also addressed, in order to suggest a more aware use of such data and the several computational tools available for analysing them. AbstractPublic perception of science and technology; Representations of science and technology; Science and media KeywordsTen years have passed since the publication of an article by Savage and Burrows that enjoyed significant success and launched a still ongoing debate within social sciences. Entitled The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology, the article speculated that up to that moment certain research methods had ensured sociology a leading position in the field of theoretical research and reflection on social phenomena. However, according to the authors, such methods were running the risk of being overshadowed by the growing availability of digital data produced as a secondary effect by the countless transactions on the web (the so-called transactional data), as well as the spreading of tools for collecting, processing and analysing such data in order to exploit their enormous marketing potential. As a strategy to address such issue, Savage and Burrows suggested involving transactional data, primarily those produced by social media, also in social research by adapting methods and techniques to the new digital reality [Savage and Burrows, 2007]. A few years later, Rogers put forward a similar proposal and suggested that digital methods should be developed to enrich and renew the apparatus of social research [Rogers, 2013]. Meanwhile, the invitation to start using such data not specifically produced for social research was reiterated by several other researchers.

Monitoring Technoscientific Issues in the News

“…However, because we gathered all the published articles, we were able to compute the salience indicator that showed how the coverage of technoscience is more stable and the increment is mostly due to the increasing number of articles published on-line over the years. This result is documented in [ 14 ].

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«Hands off the olive trees!»: the epistemic war in the Xylella fastidiosa epidemic in Italy. A Computer-Assisted Text Analysis of User-generated content on social media

“…The acronym CATA refers to «a family of methods wedding statistical analysis of texts with interpretative techniques» (Anstead 2018: 292), which are deemed to be ideal tools in the analysis of media frames in technoscientific conflicts (Neresini, Lorenzet 2016), and have been mobilised for research in STS for about a decade now (see, for example, Venturini 2012; Ribes, Vertesi 2019;Neresini 2017).…”