Conversation about the city: Urban commons and connected citizenship

The analysis of conversations between Italian and Brazilian groups allows to understand meanings that inspire and motivate political demonstrations and different performances in favor of a desired city. The research takes a descriptive perspective, based on categories of analysis informed by theories, but made by the exploration of terms used in conversations caught by members of four Facebook groups. The expectation is to highlight concepts, revealed by the set of statements made by people interested in trends that city growth takes or just in the given uses of urban spaces. To provide clues for the interpretation of the talks, we use centrality indices of Social Network Analysis (SNA) in a semantic network of concepts. Thus, it is possible to establish similarities and differences between current forms of civic participation and politics on urban commons largely supported by online social networks

Sparsity Data Reduction In Textual Network Analysis. An exercise on Sustainability meaning

In this paper, we propose a new strategy to derive an unweighted adjacency matrix from an affiliation matrix. The strategy is based on the use of a biclustering technique in order to reduce the sparsity of the matrix without changing the network structure. As an example, we implemented this approach to seek the common meaning of the term sustainability by using an affiliation matrix characterized by a core-periphery structure. The application of BiMax Biclustering algorithm shows a sparsity reduction of the unweighted adjacency matrix with an invariant network structure