Comparing electoral campaigns by analysing online data

Our work addresses the influence of ICT technologies for campaigning purposes on the evolving dynamics of information flows from the eminently social beings that candidates are. Our approach combines an analysis of contents to technological and methodological concerns. In particular, this paper presents results concerning three of the data collections life cycle phases: collection, cleaning, and storage. The result is a data collection ready to be analysed for different purposes. The paper also describes our experimental validation for comparing political campaigns behaviour in France and the United Kingdom during the European elections in 2014. © The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.