Chapter 3 Digital development culture in Europ

European projects lend themselves to undergoing a comparative analysis through qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods. Among the various elements that organise the comparison, an important element is the cultural dimension since it organises the practices of social actors, which is often carried out with qualitative methods. From a cultural perspective, universities diversify in terms of disciplines, curricula, organisation, and epistemological and philosophical traditions, assuming a socialising function in the local social context. In terms of studies, as already mentioned in the Introduction, there have been attempts to taxonomise and modelize the realities of higher education (Dobbins et al. 2011), even with the risk of simplifying and reducing the complexity of the phenomenon (Clark 1987). Environmental factors and institutional and local traditions, and national cultures (Valimaa, 1998) affect higher education, which therefore takes the form of an open and constantly evolving system (van Vught 1996). These digital transformations are a major influence in all aspects: organisational, didactic, research and development, third mission, etc. Consequently, a complex organisation cannot fail to consider the cultural dimension which emerges through its didactic package, the curriculum and the organisation of the disciplinary sectors, adopted in consideration of the supranational and national constraints and the strategic development guidelines pursued at the level of each university. Furthermore, translating national and supranational policies into individual-specific contexts is never an automatic and linear process (Lendvai, Stubbs 2007; Johnson e Hagstrom 2005). Our work has chosen to address the problem of policy transfer by analysing the language that translates the decision-making process into practices, programs, and tools based on the theory of translation, with a focus on the geometric and semiotic dimensions of translation (Callon 1986; Latour 1986, 1987). This complex political and cultural process of transfer and transformation is brought to light through textual analysis as a methodology capable of revealing the choice and association of words used to organise communication, and thus define the horizon of cultural meaning in which the case studies under analysis move (e.g., Reinert, 1995; Carli and Paniccia, 2002; Greco, 2016). This work proposes a text-mining procedure to compare the symbolic-cultural categories present in the documents that account for the results obtained in the Erasmus+ ECOLHE Project.