Abstract
Since its earliest conceptualization, Social Representations Theory has cast light on the mechanisms through which media communication contributes to shaping social thinking and transforming the various objects of knowledge that characterize the flow of everyday life unfamiliar ideas and concepts. The present chapter intends to enlarge the understanding of the role of the media in the genesis, diffusion, and transformation of the social representations of complex issues that are relevant in the social arena. More specifically, it aims to shed light on the dynamic structures that connect the representational forms produced by media discourses so as to generate coherent, meaningful patterns of thoughts and cognitions. This main aim is pursued at a twofold level, both in theory and method. At the first level, a theoretical bridge connects the notion of social representations and the concept of symbolic universes. To be more precise, social representations are described as concrete “instantiations” of abstract, generalized symbolic universes while media discourses are presented as (one of) the communicative contexts in which important issues are represented in recursive patterns of meaning-making, e.g. social representations. At the same time, we contribute to the literature on the methodology of studying social representations by applying a combination of text mining techniques and multiple correspondence analysis to link textual and survey data.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the research design each country was expected to select 4 national (2 left-oriented + 2 right oriented) and 15–20 local newspapers. However, due to the uneven availability and accessibility of newspaper archives in the six countries, the observed distribution shows only partial correspondence with the expected distribution.
- 2.
The analyses on the French dataset, which included only articles on Islam, were run separately.
- 3.
The segmentation of the text into ECUs has to find a point of equilibrium between two opposed requirements: interpretability and specificity. On the one hand, the segments have to be long enough to be interpretable in terms of thematic content. On the other hand, the longer the segments are, the greater the likelihood that each segment may not be associated with a specific thematic content.
- 4.
The lemmatization of the Italian and English corpora was performed by means of the vocabulary provided by T-LAB. The lemmatization of the Greek and Romanian corpora was performed by means of an ad hoc vocabulary built by the respective national research teams. Building the Greek and Romanian vocabulary required the following procedure, performed separately for the two languages by the respective language teams.
(a) The whole set of lexical forms composing the corpora in that language were singled out. This was made by means of the automatized procedure performed by T-LAB whose output is the list of the lexical units and the corresponding occurrences. The Romanian list of lexical forms comprised 35,251 units; the Greek list comprised 162,678.
(b) Each lexical form in analysis was categorized according to its lemma, with each syntactic category lemmatized separately. Hence, it was maintained the distinction between verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and nouns even when there was similarity among lemmas (e.g., considering the English “driven”, “drove” and “driving” were lemmatized as “to drive” but “drivers” and “driver” were lemmatized as “driver”).
- 5.
The definition of lists of lemmas composed of the same number of items across analyses (n = 1000) responds to a requirement and a goal. (a) T-LAB is able to implement the procedure of correspondence analysis if the data matrix does not exceed a certain number of columns; (b) the definition of a single number of lemmas makes the structures of data more comparable across analyses. On the other hand, n = 1000 guarantees a large enough extension for the analysis to reduce the risk of a biased selection.
- 6.
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Rochira, A., Salvatore, S., Veltri, G.A., Redd, R.R., Lancia, F. (2020). Theory and Method for the Analysis of Social Representations. In: Mannarini, T., Veltri, G., Salvatore, S. (eds) Media and Social Representations of Otherness. Culture in Policy Making: The Symbolic Universes of Social Action. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36099-3_2
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