Article | Open Access
Monitoring Electoral Democracy: Discovering and Reusing Text and Multimedia Data for Political Communication Research
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Abstract: Political communication research relies on a fragmented landscape of media sources, text and multimedia corpora, analytical tools, and research workflows. Researchers face two related barriers: identifying which resources exist and determining whether and under what conditions they can be accessed and reused. This article presents Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem), a distributed European research infrastructure for comparative political communication research, with particular attention to its Service Center for Text and Multimedia Data. The Service Center develops two complementary services: MEDem Meteor provides a curated, knowledge-graph-based discovery layer that connects media sources, datasets, archives, analytical tools, and publications; MEDem Amsterdam Content Analysis Toolkit supports the hosting, controlled reuse, and non-consumptive analysis of text and multimedia corpora. Together, the services address discovery and access as interconnected infrastructural problems. MEDem Meteor makes dispersed resources, relationships, and coverage gaps visible, while MEDem Amsterdam Content Analysis Toolkit makes access conditions transparent and enables reuse without redistributing protected content. This combination can reduce duplicated data collection, support more theoretically informed source selection, and strengthen cumulative and comparative research. Its realization, however, depends on sustained curation, community participation, and long-term institutional commitment.
Keywords: comparative research; content analysis; FAIR data; open science; research infrastructures
Published:
Issue:
Vol 14 (2026): Open Research Infrastructures and Resources for Communication and Media Studies (In Progress)
© Jakob-Moritz Eberl, Jana Bernhard-Harrer, Mariken van der Velden, Sofia Gil Clavel, Paul Balluff, Johannes B. Gruber, Noëlle S. Lebernegg, Kasper Welbers, Marvin Stecker, Claes Holger de Vreese, Wouter van Atteveldt, Rens Vliegenthart, Hajo G. Boomgaarden. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.