Big Text Corpora & Mixed Methods. The roman Five Star Movement blog

This paper presents the most significant results of a study into the political communication of the Rome branch of the M5S, or Five Stars Movement, conducted through analysis of its blog, a big text corpus, comprising posts, comments and images, which brought together between the period immediately prior to the May 2013 administrative elections and the present day. This corpus was subjected to advanced statistical text analysis, and targeted hermeneutic and content analysis. Semiotic analyses of visual material were also performed, in addition to network analyses of blog contributors and analyses of communicational efficacy. Research team members from several disciplines and a variety of institutions, worked in constant collaboration, adopting a mixed-method approach.