Abstract
This chapter examines the reactions of Italian, Spanish, French and German citizens through the comments left on Twitter. Italy, Spain, France and Germany were the first four European nations to be affected by the virus and to implement measures to contain the contagion such as the lockdown. Through the merged method of Emotional text mining, citizens’ reactions are clustered and sentiment analysis is carried out on them. The tweets reveal a concern for the crisis that is not only health, but also economic, political and social.
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Notes
- 1.
Indeed, Spanish is the official language of many states of South America. French is spoken in Canada (i.e., mainly in the provinces of Québec and New Brunswick and to a significant extent in Ontario and Manitoba), Belgium, Switzerland, numerous islands of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, Luxembourg, the Principality of Monaco, is the official language of about 30 states worldwide (as a legacy of the French colonial empire and Belgian colonization), numerous international organizations (e.g., the United Nations Organization), is one of the three working languages (together with English and German) of the EU, and it is also spoken, protected, and enjoys a co-official status (with Italian) in the Aosta Valley, Italy. Finally, Italian is the official language in San Marino, Switzerland, and the Vatican City, in parts of Croatia and Slovenia, and there are Italian language communities that can be found in states such as Albania, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bosnia, Malta, Egypt, Eritrea, other European States, Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The German language in Europe is spoken and recognized as an official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg. It is the language with the largest number of native speakers on the European continent and the European Union. Liechtenstein is the only country in the world where German is the only official and spoken language. Outside these states, there is a special statute in the Italian territories of the autonomous province of Bolzano. In the rest of Europe, German is mainly spoken as a second language. Other German-speaking European communities are found in northern Italy, in the French regions of Alsace and Lorraine and in some border centres in the county of southern Jutland in Denmark. German-speaking communities can also be found in parts of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Russia, and Kazakhstan.
- 2.
ETM is a sentiment analysis that allows for a social profiling. This new analytical method was developed by Greco at Sapienza University of Rome jointly with Paris Descartes University from 2011–2015, being awarded by the University of Sorbonne Paris Cité and the Sapienza University of Rome. For an in-depth understanding of the ETM method, both regarding its theoretical and methodological background and statistical procedures, we suggest referring to Greco’s studies (e.g., Greco, 2016a, 2016b; Greco & Polli, 2020). ETM has recently been incorporated into merged methods (Gobo et al., 2021).
- 3.
The classification procedure was completely automatic, but the researcher did have the possibility to assign names of labels, thus ensuring that the content that emerged from the analyses were reflective of the data set and respected the original information. Thus, while the software automatically classifies the terms and builds clusters, the researcher identified their meaning by enclosing them in a label.
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La Rocca, G., Greco, F., Boccia Artieri, G. (2023). The Practice of Emergency Gatewatching During the First Phase of the Pandemic. An Analysis Through the Tweets in Italian, Spanish, French and German. In: La Rocca, G., Carignan, ME., Boccia Artieri, G. (eds) Infodemic Disorder. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13698-6_5
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