ItaGLAM: A corpus of Cultural Communication on Twitter during the Pandemic
Authors: Gennaro Nolano, Carola Carlino, Maria Pia di Buono, Johanna Monti (Università di Napoli L'Orientale, 2020)
Topic: Sentiment, Emotion, Irony, Hate

Abstract
This paper describes the compilation and annotation of ItaGLAM, a corpus of tweets written by Italian Galleries, Libreries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) during the lockdown period in Italy due to the COVID-19 pandemic. ItaGLAM has been annotated with a set of labels which may be useful to identify different types of communication. Furthermore, the collected data have been used to train a set of classifiers. The results are analyzed to evaluate the information flow between GLAM and users and to analyze cultural communication on the Web.

Introduction
Over the last years, Social Networks have become one of the most popular platforms for sharing experiences and opinions through the use of simple strings of text AUTHOR. Indeed, this way of communicating has become an essential interaction tool, not only among private users, but also among companies to engage with their audience and to promote their brands AUTHOR. The use of social networks has also been adopted by museums, that, over time, have changed their way of communicating with their audience}. In particular, in regards to the GLAM sector, a new trend has been observed in recent years: the use of the web as a way to create and foster an online community AUTHOR. While during the first decade of this century museum professionals considered the exhibition of collections on social networks AUTHOR as `excessive', nowadays the use of these platforms has become the norm. As AUTHOR pointed out in their study about the use of social networks (and in particular Instagram) by museums in the Greek culture scene: `social media has become a key factor in the way that cultural organizations communicate with their public in supporting the marketing of performing art organizations'. Such centrality makes the Social network a potentially effective means that allows GLAMs to reach a wide and heterogeneous audience and to adapt to it. Therefore, we believe that the analysis of the cultural communication implies an analysis of how cultural corporations interact with the audience through social networks. After considering the most used social networks (namely Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) in the cultural sector, we have decided to focus our research on the use of Twitter, which has already been proven to be a solid basis to analyze institutional communication, as AUTHOR have highlighted. Therefore, the main aim of our research is to investigate how Italian GLAMS have extraordinarily AUTHOR interacted with their audience during the lockdown in Italy due to the COVID-19 pandemic AUTHOR, i.e. in the period from the 8th of March to the 5th of May 2020 (as per DPCM March 11 2020). Over this time many cultural initiatives have been launched with the aim of strengthening the dialogue with the audience and make sure that, despite the impossibility of any kind of physical access, the connection between GLAMs and their visitors would not be interrupted. It has been observed that during the aforementioned period, while GLAMs institutions have drastically increased their use of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the latter one was the only Social Network for which an increase in the interaction audience-institution has been registered AUTHOR. The study of communicative intents by GLAMs through Social Networks in the Italian language is still novel and, as such, best practices and tools to use still need to be tested and honed. In particular, there is still the need for an annotated corpus and a classifier that can be used on large amounts of data. Despite the time frame taken into account is relatively short (covering 58 days in total), we think that investigating how Italian GLAMs used the web when it was the only form of communication at their disposal, represents a good training ground to test our practices and to train and evaluate different kinds of classifiers useful also in future works. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the related works in the analysis of communication on Twitter by cultural institutions. Section 3 introduces the methodology used in this analysis: namely, it describes the creation of the corpus, the creation and use of the annotation set, and the training and evaluation of different classifiers. Finally, in Section 4 we explain the results of the research.

Conclusion
In this work, we have described our project for classifying communicative intents in tweets written by Italian GLAMs during the COVID-19 lockdown. Through the experiments and the following analysis we have shown how this task can be challenging. As future work we will focus on: increasing the size of the corpus, integrating statistical techniques to help dealing with imbalanced labels, and finally improving the selection and reweighting of the features (in particular concerning the hashtags). Another topic which needs further investigation concerns the use of different kinds of textual embeddings, which might improve the result. Once honed, the metholody and the tools we have used in this research could become an important asset in better understanding and analyzing cultural communication on the Web.