Smart working during the Covid19 pandemic in Italy: Twitter narratives in female-centered communities.

While the recent pandemic has accelerated the spread of smart working dynamics in Italy, social media increased their importance as platforms to vehiculate information and points of view and shape public opinion. In the face of extended confinement and a looming health crisis, society has had to fundamentally rethink its daily work practices, social relations, family relationship management, and work-life balance. As a result, the radical and abrupt migration to networked platforms has been a disruptive and unprecedented phenomenon. We aimed to investigate the Twitter debate on smart working during the pandemic by focusing mainly on social concerns and thematics related to work-life balance by addressing the following research questions: RQ1: How was the topic of smart working debated on Twitter during the Covid19 pandemic (2020-2021) in Italy, and which narratives and issues fuelled the debate the most? RQ2: How the public debate has received the Italian government's worklife balance measures?RQ3: Which topics were most discussed by women on smart working? We used Digital Methods to cope with re-proposing data to depict collective phenomena, social transformations, and cultural expressions by analyzing natively digital data on social media platforms. We gathered more than 750.000 tweets between 28 February 2020 and 30 November 2021, and we mapped narratives and communities by using social network analysis. This allowed for the selection of the more intriguing ones to define various sub-datasets on which to conduct a topic modeling study, which aided in understanding more nuanced aspects of the highly fragmented topic. By studying the italian debate, we identified specific communities which debated government measures to help families during the pandemic and discussed digitalization and smart working as a new paradigm for work. We found DAD (Didactic at Distance, aka homeschooling) as a transversal topic that highly affected how people experienced smart working

Communico case study: an e-learning community environment

Communico case study: an e-learning community environment Communico is the name of a virtual community that has been operating since 1998 as part of the academic course “Multimedia Communication”, held by Professor Mario Ricciardi. The purpose of this paper is to present the current edition (2003/2004), developed with a group of 60 students belonging to Cinema and Communication Science Engineering Course. This project is based on and requires a new way of designing didactic courseware and, as follow-up, it establishes specific individual and group socio-identity dynamics

Immersive Movies: The Effect of Point of View on Narrative Engagement

Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) offers filmmakers a wide range of possibilities to explore new techniques regarding movie scripting, shooting and editing. Despite the many experiments performed so far with both live action and computer-generated movies, just a few studies focused on analyzing how these cinematic techniques actually affect the viewers’ experience. Like in traditional cinema, a key step for CVR screenwriters and directors is to choose from which perspective the viewers will see the scene, the so-called point of view (POV). The aim of this paper is to understand to what extent watching an immersive movie from a specific POV could impact the narrative engagement (NE), i.e., the viewers’ sensation of being immersed in the movie environment and being connected with its characters and story. Two POVs that are typically used in CVR, i.e., first-person perspective (1-PP) and external perspective (EP), are investigated through a user study in which both objective and subjective metrics were collected. The user study was carried out by leveraging two live action 360° short films with distinct scripts. The results suggest that the 1-PP experience could be more pleasant than the EP one in terms of overall NE and narrative presence, or even for all the NE dimensions if the potential of that POV is specifically exploited