Monitoring Collective Attention During Disasters

The proliferation of vast information shared through social media and other communication technologies has led us to an era of attention scarcity. Effective crisis response requires both a systematic understanding of how collective attention emerges during disaster events and robust techniques for monitoring the public's attention shift due to the events.However, "attention" is an abstract concept that is very challenging to characterize. In this work, we propose an attention shift network to systematically analyze the dynamics of collective attention in response to real-world exogenous shocks such as disasters. Using hashtags appeared in Twitter users' complete timelines around a violent terrorist attack -- the Paris attacks occurred on November 13, 2015 -- we thoroughly investigate the properties of network structures and reveal the temporal dynamics of the collective attention under both regular time and exogenous shock.