Enrica Amaturo, Text as data: From Media Studies to Digital Sociology and Emerging Technologies.

Abstract

The speech traces the evolving trajectory of Content Analysis (CA) from its origins in the study of traditional media to its current repositioning within digital sociology and the challenges posed by emerging technologies. Historically marked by phases of prominence and decline, CA has proven to be a flexible and hybrid set of techniques that navigates the tensions between qualitative interpretation and quantitative rigor. With the advent of the internet, Web 2.0, and the platformization of communication, CA has undergone profound transformations: the distinction between content and context has blurred, and texts have become inseparable from the algorithmic infrastructures that organize, rank, and circulate them. This shift has pushed CA toward computational methods and interdisciplinary dialogues, situating it as a critical tool in the analysis of big and hybrid data. Today, generative AI and quantum technologies introduce a new paradigm, requiring scholars to adopt adaptive and critically optimistic epistemologies. Drawing on the contributions of the Neapolitan School of Methodology, this presentation highlights how CA can continue to serve as a laboratory of innovation, bridging continuity and transformation in the face of rapidly changing communicative environments.

Nina Baur, Rethinking Populations and Cases. Implications of Taking into Account Digitalization, Migration and Decolonial Contexts.

Juan Piovani, Methodology in the Peripheries: Circulation, Appropriation, and Production of Methodological Knowledge in Latin America.

Abstract

This presentation addresses the current situation of the methodological field in Latin America, within the framework of a global academic system characterized by an unequal structure of knowledge production, publication, and circulation, in which this region occupies a relatively peripheral position. Contrary to the idea that peripheries merely play a receptive role of knowledge produced in the main centers (Europe and the United States), this presentation shows that Latin America has its own tradition of methodological knowledge production, with a strong impact on the regional circuit but little presence in the mainstream international circuit. Original contributions in the field of quantitative methods have been limited, but they have been relevant in the areas of critical epistemologies and qualitative methods, especially participatory action research, anticipating by decades the convivial and participatory turns on which are based some recent methodological trends on a global scale.