Journalism, database and the construction of a connected public sphere

Abstract

The paper aims to reveal the results of researched project research project applied in Conected Social Media Observatory, called Neofluxo. It was approved by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and its main objective is to identify the behavior of informational flow in social networks during the majority electoral processs in Brazil, in 2010 and demonstrate the possibility to produce Journalism through the intersection and data visualization using APIs. The project stored more than 20,2 million of mentions of candidates, and keywords defined by the researchers. For this, it was elaborated a specific computer program based on an open source that is able to track entries from Twitter users from keywords, collecting and storing them in the database. The Neofluxo also recorded data from official social networks of candidates Jose Serra, Dilma Rousseff and Marina Silva, in order to identify –by these starting points - the informational flows until they have reached Twitter.