Thematic Analysis as a New Culturomic Tool: The Social Media Coverage on COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy

Massimo Aria, Corrado Cuccurullo, Luca D’Aniello, Michelangelo Misuraca and Maria Spano
Additional contact information
Massimo Aria: Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Naples Federico II, 80126 Naples, Italy
Corrado Cuccurullo: K-Synth Spin-Off, University of Naples Federico II, 80126 Naples, Italy
Luca D’Aniello: K-Synth Spin-Off, University of Naples Federico II, 80126 Naples, Italy
Michelangelo Misuraca: Department of Business Administration and Law, University of Calabria, 87036 Arcavacata di Rende, Italy
Maria Spano: Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Naples Federico II, 80126 Naples, Italy

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 6, 1-22

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic influenced people’s everyday lives because of the health emergency and the resulting socio-economic crisis. People use social media to share experiences and search for information about the disease more than before. This paper aims at analysing the discourse on COVID-19 developed in 2020 by Italian tweeters, creating a digital storytelling of the pandemic. Employing thematic analysis , an approach used in bibliometrics to highlight the conceptual structure of a research domain, different time slices have been described, bringing out the most discussed topics. The graphical mapping of these topics allowed obtaining an easily readable representation of the discourse, paving the way for novel uses of thematic analyses in social sciences.

Keywords: text analytics; topic detection; thematic mapping (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/6/3643/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/6/3643/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:6:p:3643-:d:775413

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().