MediaSwell is an experimental platform designed to meet the scientific challenges of analyzing the practices and social uses of digital online communication devices. MediaSwell responds more particularly to the constraints of the study of media events and of the production/diffusion of information in digital networks.
The computer architecture adopted makes it possible to implement a wide variety of protocols for data collection and incremental analysis. MediaSwell thus meets two types of scientific goals : retrospective analysis of recorded collections, and instant incremental analysis.
Technically, MediaSwell makes it possible to organize and monitor the activity of modules whose respective purposes contribute to the capture, analysis or enrichment of asynchronous data flows from the Web and Digital Social Networks.
MediaSwell includes parameterized generic modules, associated with Web Scraping, search engine  (Bing, Google,...), document downloading (pdf, xml, etc.), as well as communication with certain Service Platform Interfaces (APIs) (Twitter, Youtube, etc.). This modularity makes it possible to develop processes adapted to archiving or dynamic evaluation projects of information flows.
A global monitoring is ensured by a controller module which permanently checks that the activity of the modules and their resulting data flows are in conformity with the flow of scripts associated with the processes of data collection and  of information processing. The aim of this monitoring is to document and optimise the operation of the experimental system.