Trend curation in digital media as a process of organizing and representing information

Abstract

Trend curation is present in various information products across digital media platforms, yet it remains understudied and insufficiently recognized as a process of information organization and representation. This paper aimed to characterize trend curation as an organized information offering and, as such, as a process of interest to Information Science. A Qualitative and exploratory bibliographic research was conducted on the concept, followed by documentary research into the official documentation and marketing presentations of four products of this type: YouTube's Trending (Em Alta); TikTok's Trend Discovery (Central de Tendências); X's Trending Topics; and Pinterest Trends. It was found that, across all four products, content and topics are valued according to objective criteria of popularity, frequency, and engagement, with their relevance calculated relative to the collection itself. Two curation arrangements were further identified: direct content recommendation, on YouTube, and representation-mediated topic recommendation (folksonomy on TikTok, topic modeling on X, and normalization of search expressions on Pinterest). It is concluded that trend curation constitutes a process of information organization, thematic representation, and relevance evaluation, which justifies its study within Information Science.