Roberta Bracciale
University of Pisa
Italy

Roberta Bracciale, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Media Sociology at the Department of Political Science, University of Pisa, Italy. She teaches “Sociology of New Media” within the master’s degree programmes in: Business Communication and Human Resources Policy, Humanistic Informatics, and Sociology. She is a member of the PhD Board in “Data Science” of Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa; Research Associate at Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) of Pisa; and Director of the MediaLaB - Big Data in Social and Political Research Laboratory of the University of Pisa. Her current research interests focus on the social impact of digital media on citizens’ everyday life, paying special attention to methodological perspectives related to media studies (eg. Big Data and Digital Methods) applied to the field of Political Communication and to the issue of Digital Inequalities.

Antonio Martella
University of Pisa
Italy

Antonio Martella Antonio Martella is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Political Science Department of the University of Pisa, Italy. He earned a master’s degree with honour in “Business Communication and Human Resource Policy” at the Political Science Department of the University of Pisa, and a postgraduate master in “Big Data Analytics & Social Mining” at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa. He is member of the MediaLaB - Big Data in Social and Political Research Laboratory of the University of Pisa. His research interests focus on political communication in social media, populism and leaders, big data analysis, social network analysis and machine learning.

Chiara Visentin
University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore
Italy

Chiara Visentin is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Sociology at University of Pisa and a Diploma in Human Sciences at Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. She holds a major in Philosophy (University of Pisa). During the last year, she has worked as a research assistant at the MediaLaB of the Political Science Department of University of Pisa, where she has contributed to several projects centered on the use of big data in social and political research, concerning the profiling of Twitter users and the analysis of social media campaigning. She is currently working on the relationships between algorithms and society, that she aims at investigating through the comparison of the algorithm with past forms of organizing people, things and information. Linked to this, she is also interested in mechanisms of user classification exploited by online platforms.