Online textual data and political communication analysis. Methodological issues and research perspectives

In a word in which data become too big, too fast, and too pervasive, the analysis of political communication flows that take shape online become more fluid and complicated. This opens new challenges for social scientists in the direction of the adequateness of methods, tools, and approaches towards hybrid and mixed way of doing research. With our contributions we would like to assess a first review of the work done—on the methodological side—by some scholars in the field of political communication studies (about networked public sphere, electoral forecasting, the role of influencer, etc.). After that we conduct a reflection on future development and research trajectories by assessing the principal critical points and the open scenarios on the study of digital phenomena in the Big Data Era.