Opportunities of Using Big Data in Social Sciences: Work Injuries through Media Analysis

In recent times, the diffusion of the Internet has generated a revolution in many areas of Social Sciences. Today, people increasingly share information online, creating a huge amount of available data; for that reason, the Web represents today the first source of the so-called “Big Data”. As extensively reported in the literature, they represent a huge and important source of information for social research, even if many open questions about the extraction and the utilization of them persist. In this paper, we show how Big Data could improve the knowledge of social phenomena through a specific project developed in the Italian context. After a brief literature survey on Big Data, we introduce a pilot project we are carrying on with the Italian National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work regarding the monitoring of media news related to occupational injuries, with the aim of observing how mass media deal with safety and health at work. In a first phase of this project, a selection of online newspapers articles about work accidents were collected; to analyse these documents, we use several text mining techniques. The results show how Big Data utilization can enlarge the know-how of social phenomena, providing different aspects, perspectives and causes for reflection.