Davide Bennato, University of Catania, Italy

Computational and socio-computational approach in conflict. The case of "Mafia Capitale"
A great number of researches in computational social science are strong in the use of algorithms and based of a huge quantity of data. From one hand this approach is useful to understand the core of the data, but from another they are too much computational based rather than social science based. The aim of the tutorial is make a comparison between a mainly computational approach and a social science approach. To describe what this conflict is about we will use as case study a dataset of Twitter posts whose topic is "Mafia Capitale", an judicial investigation that is creating a great debate in Italian public opinion.

Bio
Davide Bennato is professor of Sociology of culture and communication and Sociology of digital media at the Department of Humanistic Sciences at the University of Catania. He has been professor in a different Italian universities: Roma "La Sapienza", LUISS, University of Siena, University of Molise. He is one of the founding members and vice-president (2005-08) of STS-Italia (Italian Association of Science and Technology Studies). He is member of the board of Bench s.r.l., a University of Catania spin off in social and marketing researches. His researches are focused on internet society and digital cultural models from a computational social science perspective.