Paolo Diana

The language of digital constitutionalism and the role of national parliaments

Attempts to establish constitutional provisions for the Internet have been promoted since the late 1990s, mainly by the global civil society and intergovernmental organisations. More recently, a new wave of digital constitutionalism has emerged from the nation-state level, and particularly from national parliaments. In order to better understand this process, the article seeks to investigate, from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, whether and to what extent parliamentary initiatives exhibit specific political features compared to constitutional attempts emerging from other kinds of sources. Further, the study aims to assess if drafting initiatives overlap or, rather, respond in different ways to different constitutional concerns.

E-learning in prison: a proposal

Distance learning is benefcial not only to those students who encounter diffculties when attending courses, but also to “weak” individuals such as women, immigrants and prison inmates. This article discusses several aspects of a distance learning programme for the inmates of ICATT in Eboli (SA), which is still being carried out, focusing on both the various institutional actors and the main choices made. These include, in addition to the option of e-learning, the offer of continual learning paths at secondary school and university levels, in line with the average educational rates of the Italian prison population. Finally, the article provides several details about the didactic organisation of the lessons within the online course.

Recurrence Analysis - Method and Applications

The awareness that phenomena (social, natural) are for the most part complex and consequently require more realistic models has led to the development of powerful new concepts and tools to detect, analyse, and understand non-stationarity and apparently random behaviour. Almost all existing linear and nonlinear techniques used for the study of time series presume some kind of stationarity, but the application of such tools to non-stationarity and apparently random time series produces misleading results. Recurrence analysis is an advanced technique for nonlinear data analysis used to identify the general structure, non-stationarity, and hidden recurring elements in a time series. Differently from traditional time series techniques that previously assume the nature of the series, the recurrence analysis can be conceived as a diagnostic tool which provides an exploratory analysis identifying the structure of the series. After a general overview of the epistemological and technical underpinnings for the emergent concepts of complexity and nonlinearity, this paper examines the main features of the technique through theoretical examples and a significant review of the main applications.

Social Research Methods 2.0: e-learning design

Starting from a reflection on the aims and learning outcomes of the undergraduate course on social research methods and an analysis of the entry level skills of students, especially related to the reasoning with number, this article illustrates the design process of the course in a blended format. In particular, we present the activities of translation, implementation and innovation of the logical and conceptual structure of quantitative empirical research in the e-learning environment. From our point of view, the use of the e-learning platform allows learners to overcome the difficulties that they usually have in the quantitative analysis of social phenomena.

Retorica dello sviluppo e pratiche di coping in un’area periferica dell’Italia meridionale

The emerging local development approach is centred on categories such asthose of governance, network, activation, and trust. This change in the developmentdiscourse can be intended as an attempt to give political relevance tothe local ruling networks while making civil society responsible. The authorsbuild from the actor-oriented perspective as defined by Norman Long, in orderto compare the rhetoric of the local government network, and the coping practicesdeveloped by a specific category of actors: self-employed workers andsmall entrepreneurs active in sectors - traditional craftsmanship, wellness,tourism - seen as relevant for the post-industrial development in a peripheralregion of southern Italy, namely Irpinia.