"Days like These": Un'Analisi Semio-computazionale del Discorso della Privacy ai Tempi del COVID-19 in Italia e Germania. ​

. ​Abstract della tesi in ingleseThe present research is divided into two parts and the overall main goal is to investigate the evolution of the idea of privacy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first part aims to offer a semiotic interpretation of the concept of privacy, both online and offline, in a society that is not only digital but also in a “state of exception” due to the pandemic. The experience of the pandemic is of course data-driven: the data infrastructure helps to have a visualization of the situation, according to which many measures have been taken. Movement limitations, lockdown and vaccine pass are just some examples of these choices. Thus, as a semiotician, it is important firstly to note how the flow of information is normally regulated within a society and within different relationships between people, how the pandemic is changing it and what consequences this brings. Secondly, it is crucial to investigate the meaning of privacy when it takes to protect and save human lives, so when actions have to be taken for the “common good” of a certain community. The second part of the project uses the sentiment analysis tool and is carried out with the Twitter API. It is a comparative research on the perception of privacy among Italian and German Twitter users after the introduction of the EU Digital Covide Certificate. The main goal is to investigate if and how much the privacy topic is brought up across user's tweets when talking about this new measure and to compare the results between Italy and Germany, two European countries that had a common past rooted in totalitarianism and that show today differences in how their citizens deal with the pandemic issue. ​