Focus points of political attention: Collective curating on Twitter during the 2013 federal election in Germany

The growing use of digital services has provided researchers access to focus points of public attention through the analysis of digital trace data. A very promising data source is the microblogging service Twitter as it has become a popular platform to share and comment on news. Twitter's comparably open data access policy allows researchers to comprehensively collect tweets commenting on specific topics, mentioning specific actors, or posted by populations of interest. We thus can identify prominent topics, actors, or objects associated with a set of specific keywords or among a given population of interest. In this, we can interprete the act of posting a tweet mentioning topics, actors, or objects in context of a specific keyword as part of a collective curating process. Each user signals through the text of her tweet what caught her attention in the context of a given keyword at a specific time. Aggregating these signals over specified time bins thus allows researchers insights into topics, actors, and objects of collective attention during time intervals of interest. In this paper, we will examine closely actors, topics, and objects arising from tweets of politically vocal Twitter users during the German federal election of 2013 and discuss the research potential of identifying and analyzing the results of collective curating on Twitter.