GIAT is an interdisciplinary network of researchers focussing on the epistemological, methodological and practical aspects of text analysis founded at the University of Padua in 2007.

Founding members:

Lorenzo Bernardi, Beatrice Benelli, Alberta Contarello, Michele Cortelazzo, Francesca Gambarotto, Arjuna Tuzzi and Flavia Ursini.

Scientific Board:

Alberta Contarello is a honorary professor, former full professor in Social Psychology, at the University of Padua. Her most recent research interests concern social issues in times of change, with particular attention to gender, generation, geography, investigated within a socio-constructivist theoretical framework. She has carried out research in the following areas: social psychology of interpersonal relationships, non-verbal aspects of social interaction, emotions, social psychology and literature. university website

Michele A. Cortelazzo (Padua 1952) is a professor emeritus, former full professor in Italian Linguistics, at the University of Padua. His research focuses on modern Italian and Italian for special purposes (medical, scientific and – in particular – political and institutional and administrative Italian). In the light of the results of his research, he has promoted clear and effective writing policies in the public administration. Over the last years,has expanded his interests to the application of quantitative methods for the identification of similarities between texts. university website personal website list of publications

Mirko Degli Esposti is a full professor in Mathematical Physics at the Department of Phisics and Astronomy of Alma Mater – University of Bologna. His main interest concern classical and quantum theory, dynamic and chaotic system. Recently he also focuses on mathematical methods for the analysis of textual data, on algorithms for authorship attribution and more broadly of dynamics of information on non-structured data. university website CV and list of publications

Francesca Gambarotto (Padova, 1962) is an associate professor in Applied Economics. Her main research interests concern territorial economic evolution through the lens of innovative processes. She uses content analysis methods to explore similarities and differences in the cognitive processes of economic changing agents. Currently her research activity is focused on the mapping of ecological transition processes in Italy. She teaches courses related to the circular economy and local development. university website list of publications

Stefano Ondelli (Imola, 1971) is a full professor in Italian at the Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies of the University of Trieste. He has a PhD in Romance Studies and teaches Italian. His main research interests concern Italian as a foreign language, the language of interpreters and translators, Italian for special purposes (legal and bureaucratic Italian, the language used in European institutions, the language of the press, cuisine and fashion) and issues related to non-fictional writing. personal website list of publications

Arjuna Tuzzi (Cormons, 1970) is a full professor in Social Statistics at the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology – University of Padova. Ph.D. in Applied Statistics for Economics and Social Sciences, she teaches Social research methodology and Social Statistics for undergraduates and graduates in Communication Studies (Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree) and Ph.D. students in Social sciences. Her main research interests concern: statistical analysis of textual data (content analysis, quantitative linguistics, text mining, text clustering, authorship attribution, chronological corpora), data collecting tools for social survey (question wording, survey design, non-sampling errors), statistical methods in evaluation, electoral data and political-institutional communication. She has been the President of IQLA for two offices (2014-2018) university website personal website

Research Group:

Claudia Andreatta Claudia Andreatta (Mestre, 1984) has a Ph.D in Social Science at University of Padua. Her main interest are linked to Childhood Studies. During her Master degree on Communication Science, with a study on “November 20th. A content analysis on the role of media to promote the Convention on the Rights of the Child”, she approached to quantitative methods for content analysis. Besides, she is also interested on data collecting tools for social survey.

Alberto Cammozzo works as a freelance IT professional, especially designing systems architecture, networks and security. He uses, studies and teaches Free/Open Source software. He has been for a long time an employee of the University of Padova. He holds a MA in Political Science, and his research interests are centered on the term “code”. Computer codes, genetic codes, communication and semiotic codes, organizational codes and the way they regulate. In one sentence: regulation of systems and systems of regulation. website list of publications

Marisa Cemin Statistics and textual data elaboration expert – Psychologist – Research Associate.

Paolo Cottone is an associate professor in Social Psychology at the department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education & Applied Psychology of University of Padua. After obtaining his Ph.D. in Social Psychology and Personality, has worked, and now directs the activities of the laboratory Interaction and Culture. Teaches courses in Social Psychology and Intercultural Psychology and is a member of the Doctoral Committee of the Ph.D. School in Social Sciences (Interactions, Communication and Cultural Constructions) at the University of Padua. Research interests are mostly in the field of Cultural Psychology and are focused on cooperation and communication, as social processes, with a special attention on new media and intercultural aspects. website

Chiara di Benedetto Ph.D in Romance Studies – University of Padua.

Paolo Nadalutti Paolo Nadalutti (Cormons, 1982), M.Sc. in Demographics and Social Statistics, is a data scientist currently working for a private company. He supports the GIAT by developing ad hoc statistical analysis for content analysis and text mining, building R packages for text analysis, defining statistical models for text content exploratory analysis and classification. website

Manuel Righele (Malo, 1974), master degree in Theories of Communication, carries out Web and Social Media Analytics activities, related to behaviours of use, production and dissemination of content online, in the private sphere, in collaboration with companies of the IT sector. He studied Linguistic Content Analysis and Critical Discours Analysis with a particular focus on the dynamics of power and propaganda (professional profile).

Valentina Rizzoli (Bologna, 1989) is a post-doctoral fellow at the department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome, Ph.D. in Social Sciences, graduated in Social, Communication and Work Psychology  – University of Padua. Her research interests include qualitative and quantitative methods in social psychology, particularly, computational text analyses applied to social issues. Main topics treated: risk perception, history of social psychology, economic crisis, ageing.

Ilenia Sanna (Noventa Vicentina, 1992) is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Bologna "Alma Mater". Her studies focus on contemporary Italian and on political language – that forms her doctoral project – according to qualitative and quantitative methods’ union.

Stefano Sbalchiero (Malo, 1979), Ph.D. in Sociology, is an assistant professor and researcher, University of Padua. His research interests are mainly focused on methodology and epistemology of social research, qualitative and quantitative methods, statistical analysis of textual data. From a methodological viewpoint, in the last few years he has been dealing with text mining and topic modeling using different software and approaches for the analysis of textual data (Iramuteq and Reinert’s method, Taltac2, R-software, LDA – Latent Dirichlet Allocation, STM – Structural Topic Modeling).

Andrea Sciandra is an assistant professor in Social statistics at the department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education & Applied Psychology of University of Padua. He has a master’s degree in Statistics for Demographic and Social Sciences (University of Padova) and a PhD in Sociology and Social Research (University of Verona). His main research interests include social media, text mining, social network analysis, stance detection, social inclusion, structural equation modeling and statistical learning techniques applied to social sciences. He was co-founder of Rante, the first Italian R User Group. 

Floriana Sciumbata (Crotone, 1990) is a Ph.D. in Italian Linguistics at the University of Udine, and she is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trieste. Her research focusses on language simplification, especially on easy-to-read, a model of writing for people with intellectual disabilities and other reading difficulties. Her research interests also include corpus linguistics, quantitative text analysis methods, the design and programming of computer-aided applications for linguistic analyses, Distant Reading methods and the digital humanities in general. University website Personal page

Matilde Trevisani Ph.D. in Statistics, is an associate professor at the department of Economics, Business, Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Trieste. Her main research interests concern methodological developments and applications of Hierarchical Bayesian Models (models for small area estimation, spatial data, concept maps), data mining and machine learning (supervised learning techniques for environmental risk assessment, clustering and factorial analysis for territorial data), and more recently textual data analysis (distant reading of diachronic corpora by unsupervised and supervised statistical learning). Home page (institutional) at http://www.units.it/persone/index.php/from/abook/persona/8754

Giovanni Urraci is a fixed-term researcher in Italian linguistics at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies of the University of Padua and a lecturer at Sapienza University of Rome. He holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Ca’ Foscari University and he worked as postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cagliari. His primary research interests revolve around Italian linguistics, the history of the Italian language, and digital humanities. He has conducted studies on various topics, including online communities, the terminology of Linguistics, and culinary texts from the 16th and 17th centuries. University website.

Matteo Viale (Monselice, 1976) has a 5-year degree in Communication Studies (2001) and a PhD in Romance Studies (2007). Since 2012 he is full professor in Italian Linguistics (L-FIL-LET/12) at the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies of the University of Bologna. He teaches Teaching of Italian Language and he is Director of Second Cycle Degree of Italian Studies, European Literary Cultures, Linguistics. His main research interests concern Italian Linguistics, in particular the history of non-literary language, languages for special purposes, teaching of Italian and professional writing. In addition to academic activities, he is teachers trainer and he teachs courses dealing with professional writing. university website personal website list of publications