Carlo Romano Marcello Alessandro Santagiustina

Biography

Carlo R. M. A. Santagiustina is a researcher for the SoMe4Dem H2020 project at SciencesPo Paris MediaLab. He obtained his PhD in Economics from Ca’ Foscari University Venice in 2018, with a thesis on social media discussions about collective uncertainties, focusing on their impact on political uncertainty and financial markets. His research interests span Behavioural Economics, Social Psychology, Digital Methods, Computational Social Sciences, Media Studies, Statistics, and Computational Linguistics.

Santagiustina's work explores and merges traditional research approaches with digital methods to study socio-economic phenomena through social media, web platforms, and search engine data. In particular, he has developed numerous research methodologies, models, and analysis techniques to study people's perceptions of economic, societal, political, and natural phenomena through the web. He leads the research effort for AquaGranda’s digital community-memory project, which received an Honorary Mention at the European Union Prize for Citizen Science in 2023. He has also worked on various social and technological innovation projects such as Venywhere X CISCO and MUHAI, where he coordinated the development of a Social Inequality Observatory.

He has published in journals such as the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Economics Letters, Finance Research Letters, and PloS ONE.

In recent years, he has collaborated with multiple Computational Social Science and Artificial Intelligence labs and international research teams, including scholars at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Pompeu Fabra University, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, University of Bremen, and University of Amsterdam. Together, they have designed, co-authored, and contributed to several EU H2020 proposals and projects, such as ODYCCEUS, ISEED, MUHAI, and SoMe4Dem, among others.

For SoMe4Dem, he is developing methods to analyze how social media debates influence real-world socio-economic and political outcomes, particularly regarding petition platforms and crowdfunding campaigns. His research also delves into the dynamics of online polarization, trust creation and erosion, exploring how the design of digital platforms shapes public opinion, social interactions and economic exchanges.