Taking two case studies of political twittering during the most recent federal election in Canada, this paper argues that changes in political communications facilitated in large part by the adoption of networked information and communication technologies necessitate the development of real-time forms of e-research. Dubbed “live research”, the paper discusses how political communication -- particularly during heightened periods of partisan conflict such as elections, scandals, and political/economic crises -- has changed from discrete and largely “scheduled” communicative events to constant streams or feeds of information, not unlike that produced in the TV news industry by CNN’s introduction of the 24 hour news cycle. What is suggested herein is a more nuanced, empirical approach to the shift in dynamic media flows. In particular, the methodological challenge lies in disaggregating discrete bursts of information, particularly tweets, blog posts, news articles, user comments, images, videos, etc, from their specific platforms, or from larger aggregators such as personalized feed (RSS) mangers, social networking sites (Facebook, etc), or search engines like Google in order to examine their life and presence across platforms and their intervention in shaping the moments of a political event.
