About

Election Debate Visualisation (EDV)

The Election Debate Visualisation (EDV) project explored how digital tools could help citizens understand and engage with televised election debates. Launched in October 2013 and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), it brought together researchers from the University of Leeds and The Open University.

The project built on research into the UK’s first televised leaders’ debates in 2010. Although viewers welcomed the opportunity to hear directly from political leaders, many struggled to understand competing claims and the relationships between their arguments. EDV investigated how interactive visualisations could make these debates easier to follow, revisit and evaluate.

Combining political communication, design and computing, the project placed citizens’ needs at the centre of its approach. Its research programme brought together audience research, participatory design and evaluation, exploring how people interpreted political arguments and how digital tools could support a more informed debate experience.

Achievements and outputs

EDV produced two principal tools: Democratic Replay, which combined debate recordings with interactive visualisations to help viewers explore their content, and Democratic Reflection, which captured viewers’ reactions through a range of statements expressing their thoughts and feelings. These tools supported both closer examination of political arguments and richer analysis of audience responses. The Open University’s impact account

The project also generated academic publications on citizens’ expectations of election debates, interactive debate replays and methods for studying audience engagement. Together, these outputs contributed to understanding how televised debates could better serve voters and how digital media could support political understanding and participation. Project publications and results

Project team

The project’s published team page lists:

  • Stephen Coleman — University of Leeds: Principal Investigator; political communication and democratic citizenship.
  • Giles Moss — University of Leeds: Media policy, digital democracy and qualitative research.
  • Paul Wilson — University of Leeds: Design research and practice.
  • Simon Buckingham Shum — The Open University: Learning informatics, argument modelling and visualisation.
  • Anna De Liddo — The Open University: Collective intelligence and the design and evaluation of argument mapping tools.
  • Brian Plüss — The Open University: Computational analysis of political dialogue and debate technology.
  • Alberto Ardito — The Open University project team: Web technologies, interface design and user experience.

Project team profiles

Additional Open University project records identify Harriett Cornish, Michelle Bachler and Damian Dadswell as participants. Open University project record