Digital Humanities Initiative Talk Series – Conceptual changes in vaccine discourse. A social media, graph-based analysis of the HPV vaccine case in Italy
Date: 28 October 2024 (Mon)
Time: 5pm (HKT)
Via Zoom
Language: English
Speaker:
Dr Lorella Viola, Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities & Society, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
About the talk:
Understanding how public health discourse evolves in response to increased scrutiny or societal changes is essential to help democracies develop effective strategies to counteract potentially harmful effects. This study examines the temporal dimension of how this type of public discourse evolves conceptually. The use case is the Italian discourse on Twitter related to the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, a vaccine that has been at the centre of anti-vaccination campaigns for several years (Kornides et al. 2023; Chen et al. 2021; Calo et al. 2021; Massey et al. 2020). Informed by Critical Discourse Analysis (Reisigl and Wodak 2001) theory and using bi-grams, graph analysis, and the Girvan-Newman community detection method (Girvan and Newman 2002), the study maps how changes in the HPV discourse are manifested through hashtags in Italian tweets from 2012 to 2024. The assumption is that hashtags can be interpreted as cultural products (Weller et al. 2013; Zappavigna 2012; 2016; La Rocca 2019) and that these cultural products can offer important insights into the concepts users have associated with the HPV vaccine over the past twelve years as well as answer questions of discourse proliferation and awareness. The results show a significant conceptual change. While in the years 2012-2020, the Italian HPV discourse on Twitter was mostly concerned with virus awareness and vaccine advocacy, in the years 2020-2024 anti-vaccination narratives not only spiked but they almost entirely replaced the initial discourse.
In this talk, Dr. Viola will explore how public health discourse—specifically related to the HPV vaccine on Twitter in Italy—has evolved from 2012 to 2024. Utilizing Critical Discourse Analysis and various analytical methods, her presentation examines the role of hashtags as cultural products that reflect societal attitudes. The findings indicate a significant shift: from 2012 to 2020, discussions focused on virus awareness and vaccine support; however, from 2020 to 2024, anti-vaccination narratives surged, nearly dominating the conversation. Understanding this evolution is crucial for democracies to develop effective strategies against harmful public health misinformation.
About the speaker:
Dr Lorella Viola is Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities & Society at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In her research, she develops innovative digital humanities methodologies to investigate how power, latent assumptions and implicit ideologies are manifested through language and circulated in media and society. She also researches the impact of the digital transformation of society on knowledge creation theory and practice.
