Research Questions

What we want to inspect and our expectations

As a starting point for our research we wanted to analyse Silvio Lorusso's concept of Entreprecariat. Our research questions were:

• Is it possible to determine the semantic area of 'entreprecariat' through the tools of distant reading? Is it possible to declare if it is a positive or negative phenomenon?

Since it is a neologism, it is interesting to see to which semantic area it belongs. Moreover, through the vectorializations of the words, i.e. word embedding, we can inspect similarities to see which words in the corpus are associated to this neologism.

Expectations: entreprecariat is a condition of young people, more similar to unemployment then to a job.

• Which are the main topics of Silvio Lorusso's book?

"Entreprecariat" has been proposed as a book related mainly to the condition of young workers. However, since Silvio Lorusso's interests are related to the world of design and European labour market, it is possible that the topics are different from the ones perceived. We want to inspect this through the topic modelling and comparing this books to a corpus built around the concept of self-making in the XXI century.

Expectation: entreprecariat is a western concept, more related to the creative and artistic jobs.

• Is 'entreprecariat' an actual global phenomenon or it interests some specific actors?

Through the network analysis based on entity recognition, we will see the main cited actors in this new world of creative jobs, observing if there are some main companies/people/places that are more involved then others.

Expectations: western big organizations have a huge impact in the new work conditions.