The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the political sphere since the end of the 1980s has naturally triggered academic interest for such practices. Research in this sector has thus developed significantly in the last decades, mirroring the geographical progress of the phenomenon as well as an evolution of tools, media and perspectives.
Such work has essentially focused on national, top-down communication strategies implemented for campaigning in the context of major elections. Conversely, this project chooses a Franco-English comparative approach on such issues concentrating on the 2014 European elections of May 2014 whose priority is to study the production of candidates from their respective constituencies on their websites, blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. It focuses on the French and British South-East constituencies as well as on the five parties which gathered the most votes in those constituencies at the 2009 elections to the European Parliament. In France, these were Europe Ecologie, the Front National, the Socialist party, the Centre Alliance (MODEM in 2009 / UDI-MODEM in 2014) and the UMP. In England, the Conservative, Liberal, Labour, Green and UK Independence parties.
One of the key difficulties of such a choice is the considerable amount of data generated online during political campaigns. Manual coding systems were worked out in the past so as to make academic work on such material possible. This project, thanks to the collaboration of researchers in computer sciences, aims at creating semi-automated tools to collect, archive and manage data originating from heterogeneous and voluminous data.
The experience of various research teams working on such issues in the past has indeed emphasized the interest of bringing together analytical expertise and users, in particular in order to identify significant correlations of data as well as to develop prediction models and tools for managing and analysing data in real time. This collaboration between British civilisation and computing sciences is completed by an analysis from a legal perspective of the challenges of research is this relatively new field of studies, in particular in relation to the collection and the archiving of data, and then, as far as academic production on such material is concerned.