Category Archives: Television Archive

The tech powering the Political TV Ad Archive

Ever wonder how we built the Political TV Ad Archive? This post explains what happens back stage — how we are using advanced technology to generate the counts for how many times a particular ad has aired on television, where, and when, in markets that we track.

There are three pieces to the Political TV Ad Archive:

  • The Internet Archive collects, prepares, and serves the TV content in markets where we have feeds. Collection of TV is part of a much larger effort to meet the organization’s mission of providing “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”The Internet Archive is the online home to millions of free books, movies, software, music, images, web pages and more.
  • The Duplitron 5000 is our whimsical name for an open source system responsible for taking video and creating unique, compressed versions of the audio tracks. These are known as audio fingerprints. We create an audio fingerprint for each political ad that we discover, which we then match against our incoming stream of broadcast television to find each new copy, or airing, of that ad. These results are reported back to the Internet Archive.
  • The Political TV Ad Archive is a WordPress site that presents our data and our videos and presents it to the rest of the world. On this website, for the sake of posterity, we also archive copies of political ads that may be airing in markets we don’t track, or exclusively on social media. But for the ads that show up in areas where we’re collecting TV, we are able to present the added information about airings.

 

Step 1: recording television

We have a whole bunch of hardware spread around the country to record television. That content is then pieced together to form the programs that get stored on the Internet Archive’s servers. We have a few ways to collect TV content. In some cases, such as the San Francisco market, we own and manage the hardware that records local cable. In other cases, such as markets in Ohio and Iowa, the content is provided to us by third party services.

Regardless of how we get the data, the pipeline takes it to the same place. We record in minute-long chunks of video and stitch them together into programs based on what we know about the station’s schedule. This results in video segments of anywhere from 30 minutes to 12 hours. Those programs are then turned into a variety of file formats for archival purposes.

The ad counts we publish are based on actual airings, as opposed to reported airings. This means that we are not estimating counts by analyzing Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports on spending by campaigns. Nor are we digitizing reports filed by broadcasting stations with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about political ads, though that is a worthy goal. Instead we generate counts by looking at what actually has been broadcast to the public.

Because we are working from the source, we know we aren’t being misled. On the flip side, this means that we can only report counts for the channels we actively track and record. In the first phase of our project, we tracked more than 20 markets in 11 key primary states (details here.) We’re now in the process of planning which markets we’ll track for the general elections. Our main constraint is simple: money. Capturing TV comes at a cost.

A lot can go wrong here. Storms can affect reception, packets can be lost or corrupted before they reach our servers. The result can be time shifts or missing content. But most of the time the data winds up sitting comfortably on our hard drives unscathed.

Step 2: searching television

Video is terrible when you’re trying to look for a specific piece of it. It’s slow, it’s heavy, it is far better suited for watching than for working with, but sometimes you need to find a way.

There are a few things to try. One is transcription; if you have a time-coded transcript you can do anything. Like create a text editor for video, or search for key phrases, like “I approve this message.”

The problem is that most television is not precisely transcribed. Closed captions are required for most U.S. TV programs, but not for advertisements. Shockingly, most political ads are not captioned. There are a few open source tools out there for automated transcript generation, but the results leave much to be desired.

Introducing audio fingerprinting

We use a free and open tool called audfprint to convert our audio files into audio fingerprints.

An audio fingerprint is a summarized version of an audio file, one that has removed everything except the most interesting pieces of every few milliseconds. The trick is that the summaries are formed in a way that makes it easy to compare them, and because they are summaries, the resulting fingerprint is a lot smaller and faster to work with than the original.

The audio fingerprints we use are based on a thing called frequency. Sounds are made up of waves, and each wave repeats–oscillates–at different rates. Faster repetitions are linked to higher sounds, lower repetitions are lower sounds.

An audio file contains instructions that tell a computer how to generate these waves. Audfprint breaks the audio files into tiny chunks (around 20 chunks per second) and runs a mathematical function on each fragment to identify the most prominent waves and their corresponding frequencies.

The rest is thrown out, the summaries are stored, and the result is an audio fingerprint.

If the same sound exists across two files, a common set of dominant frequencies will be seen in both fingerprints. Audfprint makes it possible to compare the chunks between two sound files, count how many they have in common, and how many appear in roughly the same distance from one another.

This is what we use to find copies of political ads.

Step 3: cataloguing political ads

When we discover a new political ad the first thing we do is register it on the Internet Archive, kicking off the ingestion process. The person who found it types in some basic information such as who the ad mentions, who paid for it, and what topics are discussed.

The ad is then sent to the system we built to manage our fingerprinting workflow, we whimsically call the Duplitron 5000—or the “DT5k.” This uses audfprint to generate fingerprints, organizes how the fingerprints are stored, process the comparison results, and allows us to scale to process across millions of minutes of television.

DT5k generates a fingerprint for the ad, stores it, and then compares that fingerprint with hundreds of thousands of existing fingerprints for the shows that had been previously ingested into the system. It takes a few hours for all of the results to come in. When they do, the Duplitron makes sense of the numbers and tells the archive which programs contain copies of the ad and what time the ad aired.

These result end up being fairly accurate, but not perfect. The matches are based on audio, not video, which means we face trouble when the same soundtrack is used in a political ad as has been used in, for instance, an infomercial.

We are working on improving the system to filter out these kinds of false positives, but even with no changes these fingerprints have provided solid data across the markets we track.

Duplitron

The Duplitron 5000, counting political ads. Credit: Lyla Duey.

Step 4: enjoying the results

And so you understand a little bit more about our system. You can download our data and watch the ads at the Political TV Ad Archive.  (For more on our metadata–what’s in it, and what can you can do with it, read here.)

Over the coming months we are working to make the system more accurate. We are also exploring ways to identify newly released political ads without any need for manual entry.

P.S. We’re also working to make it as easy as possible for any researchers to download all of our fingerprints to use in their own local copies of the Duplitron 5000. Would you like to experiment with this capability? If so, contact me on Twitter at @slifty.

Washington, DC briefing January 22 on new, free website tracking political ads

Political TV Ad Archive

The Internet Archive will be launching a new project — the Political TV Ad Archive — in Washington, DC. See details below, and stay tuned for updates:

Where: National Press Club, Murrow Room, Washington, DC

When: January 22, 2016, 9:00 am – 11:00 am

What: The Internet Archive launches the Political TV Ad Archive, an online, free digital library resource where reporters can find federal-level political TV ads in key primary states in the 2016 elections, married with fact-checking and information on the organizations funding the ads, along with downloadable metadata. Come hear about what Internet Archive and its partners have found so far:

  • When and where have ads aired?
  • Which ads contain the most egregious truth stretching or full-on lies?
  • Which candidates have been the focus of the most ads?
  • Who is paying for the ads, or is that information hidden?

Why: Political TV ad spending is expected to be in the billions. Yet the same local stations that air the ads provide very little solid reporting on politics. Even fewer correct misinformation in the ads. In partnership with trusted journalistic organizations, and with the support of the Knight News Challenge, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the new Political TV Ad Archive will help reporters stop the spin cycle by providing contextual data and information to evaluate ads. The National Press Club Journalism Institute is co-sponsoring this event.

How: The Political TV Ad Archive is monitoring television in 20 key markets in eight states, starting with such locations as Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Sioux City in Iowa and Boston-Manchester in New England. The project is using experimental audio fingerprint technology to track political TV ads for federal races. On the new website, journalists can find embeddable videos of the ads along with downloadable metadata giving them the scoop on which ads have aired, where, and when. Data will also include information on the sponsor — whether it’s a super PAC, 501(c) group that does not disclose donors, candidate-sponsored ad, or some other entity — as well as the candidates targeted.

Who:

Roger Macdonald, Director, Television Archive, Internet Archive

Kathy Kiely, Board of Directors, National Press Club Journalism Institute

John Dunbar, Deputy Executive Editor, Center for Public Integrity

Robert Maguire, Political Nonprofit Investigator, Center for Responsive Politics

Lori Robertson, Managing Editor, FactCheck.org

Louis Jacobson, Senior Correspondent, PolitiFact

Glenn Kessler, Editor, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker

Nancy Watzman, Managing Editor, Television Archive, Internet Archive

Dan Schultz, Senior Software Engineer, Television Archive, Internet Archive

Online video will be available online 24 hours after event. Stay tuned for details and link.

Press Contact:

Nancy Watzman
nancyw@archive.org

As Democratic candidates debate, Internet Archive will be gathering data

When Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders take the podium tonight along with other contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, their debate will be televised. The Television Archive will be tracking the news coverage surrounding the debate, viewable and searchable, here.

And this tool, developed by political scientist Kalev Leetaru  and fueled by Internet Archive data, allows users to see how many times a particular candidate’s name is mentioned in news coverage. Going into the debate, Hillary Clinton is getting more than twice as mentions as Sen. Bernie Sanders.

We take for granted that candidates will debate on screen, but it wasn’t always so. The faceoff between Republican Vice President Richard Nixon and Democrat U.S. Senator Jack Kennedy in 1960, 55 years ago last month, marked the first time that Americans were able to watch candidates for the nation’s highest office from the comfort of their living rooms. You can see part one of the debate here, preserved on the Archive’s servers:

The received wisdom about this famous debate was that, from this point on, candidates had to think not just about what they said on the campaign stump, but how they looked. This could make a huge difference in how the public and the media perceived who “won” the debate. Nixon looked tired and like he needed a shave. Kennedy looked healthy and vibrant. Those who listened on the radio thought Nixon won.

“It’s one of those unusual points in the timeline of history where you say things changed very dramatically–in this case, in a single night,” Alan Schroeder, a media historian and associate professor at Northeastern University, told Time Magazine in 2010.

Here’s part II of the Kennedy-Nixon 1960 debate:

We don’t know yet who the perceived winner of tonight’s debate will be. The Internet Archive’s data will provide one way to evaluate this. Stay tuned.

Who’s Really Winning the Media Wars in the 2016 Campaign?

When it comes to media coverage, it seems as if Donald Trump is “trumping” all his rivals, Republicans and Democrats alike.  But is that true?  And how does it vary by print, digital and television media?  Using the Internet Archive’s Television Archive and the GDELT Project, researcher Kalev Leetaru is able to analyze daily data to see who is winning the media wars of 2016.  Today we are excited to announce three new visualizations that explore American politics through the lens of television: a live campaign tracker hosted by The Atlantic that offers a running tally of all mentions of the 2016 presidential candidates across national television monitored by the Archive, and two visualizations that show which statements from the first Republican debate went viral on television.  Finally, an analysis published in The Guardian shows just how unique television coverage of the campaign is and how much it differs from print and online coverage.  Candidates live and die by their ability to capture media attention.  Now, thanks to Leetaru, citizens have the tools to examine the election media data daily.

A Live 2016 Campaign Tracker

atlantic-television-tracker

 

Media coverage of the 2016 presidential candidates has been dominating the news cycle for the last few months, with article after article asking which candidate is dominating the headlines at the moment.   Working with The Atlantic, we created the visualization above that tallies how many times each candidate has been mentioned on domestic national television networks thus far in 2015.  The list updates each morning, providing an incredibly unique peek into who is pulling ahead at the moment.  For those interested in drilling further into the data, an interactive explorer dashboard allows you to drill down by candidate and network.

Who Won the First Republican Debate?

debate

This past July we used audio fingerprinting technology from the Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio at Columbia University to scan the audio of all monitored television shows for two weeks after the President’s January 2015 State of the Union address and identified every time an excerpted clip of his speech was broadcast on another television show.  In this way we were able to create an interactive timeline of which portions of his speech went “viral”.

We’ve repeated that process for the first Republican debate, both the “prime” and “undercard” events, exploring which soundbites made the rounds across television news shows in the week following the debate.

For the undercard debate, Carly Fiorina was the clear winner, account for 45% of the soundbites from the debate that subsequently aired elsewhere in the following week, followed by Rick Perry at 15.7%.  Both of the most-excerpted responses from the undercard debate belonged to her, with her quote “Hillary Clinton lies about Benghazi, she lies about emails. She is still defending Planned Parenthood, and she is still her party’s frontrunner” appearing 53 times and her quote “Did any of you get a phone call from Bill Clinton? I didn’t. Maybe it’s because I hadn’t given money to the foundation or donated to his wife’s Senate campaign.” appearing 47 times.

For the prime debate, Trump was the overall winner, with 30.7% of the subsequently aired soundbites being his, followed by Rand Paul at 14.1% and Chris Christie at 13.7%.  The two most-excerpted statements of the debate were both by Trump, one regarding his refusal to pledge not to run as an Independent, which aired 199 times, and the second about his past misogynic Twitter comments, which aired 337 times.  Rand Paul and Chris Christie’s exchange about the fourth amendment and government surveillance aired 190 times, culminating in Rand Paul’s now-famous “I know you gave [President Obama] a big hug, and if you want to give him a big hug again, go right ahead.”  Ben Carson’s closing remarks about his work as a surgeon were the most-repeated of any of the candidates, with 86 rebroadcasts over the following week.

How Much Coverage is Trump Really Getting?

guardian-trump-analysis

Finally, with all of the hyperbole swirling about Trump’s utter domination of media coverage of the Republican race, a key question is just how much his lead differs across media modalities.  Is online news coverage of 2016 campaign cycle identical to print coverage identical to television coverage?  In a piece for The Guardian’s Data Blog, I explored election coverage across these different forms of media and found that Trump’s lead is entirely dependent on where you look, emphasizing just how important it is to be able to analyze television coverage directly.

As the 2016 political season begins to shift into high gear stay tuned for so much more to come as we explore television and politics!

2016 Political TV Ad Tracker: with Analysis & Fact-checking Citizens Can Trust

KNC project illustrationThe Internet Archive is honored to receive today a Knight News Challenge grant to support our collaborative efforts to help citizens make sound decisions in the 2016 U.S. elections; for the best interests of themselves, their communities and future generations.

Experts are predicting 2016 election spending will be double, or more, that of 2012. Much of that money will be spent on TV advertising. Local stations across the country will be raking in enormous sums to air these ads. But how well will the stations educate us on the issues; and offer critical analysis?  If not they, then who?

FingersCrossed
To help citizens navigate their way towards informed choices amidst the flood of political messaging, we will be building on journalism partnerships to present digital library reference pages for political ads.  Our journalism launch partners include Politifact, FactCheck.org and the Center for Public Integrity.

We will be capturing all TV programming in select 2016 primary election locales, front-loaded to reflect early-state candidate winnowing. We hope to apply lessons learned during the primaries, to key general election battleground states in the fall.  In addition to our regular TV news research library interface, we’ll be creating an online reference page for each unique-content political ad.  These pages will present journalist fact-checking and other analysis.   Accompanying these assessments will be information about ad sponsors, campaign financial transparency data as well as dynamically updated tracking on each ad’s plays, including frequency, locale, etc.  

Our 2016 Political Ad Tracker project is informed by extensive collaborative experiments conducted during the 2014 general elections in the Philadelphia-region where there were a number of hotly contested Congressional and state elections.  For more on these pilot collaborations, see Philly Political Media Watch Project and Political Ads Win Over News 45 to 1 in Philly TV News 2014.

We are continuing to refine our approaches to facilitating advanced analysis of regional inventories of television political ads.  To get a sense of the degree of their granularity, explore this interactive search visualization, created by Kalev Leetaru, derived from last year’s experiments: Philly 2014 Political Ad Trends Viewer.

Ad_FingerprintingAnother outgrowth of our political ad experiments last year was applying audio fingerprinting to algorithmically find all other instances of an ad, once a single one had been identified.  We used the audfprint tool developed by Dan Ellis at the Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio at Columbia University.

The Internet Archive and Kalev Leetaru recently took ad-finding a step further and prototyped a new way of tracking “memes” on television.  For example, everyone can now chart how the President’s 2015 State of the Union address was excerpted and discussed across U.S. and select international television over the following two weeks.  You could think of it as a TV news seismometer, tracking the propagation of key news sound bites throughout complex TV news media ecosystems, including the context in which they were presented.  We expect to apply this approach to 2016 election debates, speeches, etc.

We are humbled by the challenge of getting the word out about how our Political Ad Tracker information resources can be used.  As librarians, archivists, and technologists….market outreach is not our strength.  We’d like your help.

We are incredibly excited with the prospects of working in concert with diverse journalists, scholars and civic organizations.  Together, we hope to help balance the forces of Big Money with reason & insight, resting on sound data.  To inform and engage citizens better than ever before!

We are deeply appreciative of the Knight Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Democracy Fund and Hewlett Foundation for their support!

Tracking Politics on Television: Campaign Advertising and the State of the Union Going Viral

Today the GDELT Project and the Internet Archive debut two exciting new interactive visualizations of the TV News Archive, one tracing the flow of money through campaign advertising in Philadelphia in the 2014 election cycle, and the other introducing a whole new way of tracing what “goes viral” on television by charting how the President’s 2015 State of the Union address was excerpted and discussed across American and select international television over the following two weeks.

Media & Money: Political Advertising in Philly’s 2014 Races

phillytvadanalysis

As part of the Philly Political Media Watch Project, from September 1, 2014 through the election of November 4, 2014, 7 television stations in the Philadelphia market were monitored to identify all politically-related advertisements.  In all, 74 distinct political advertisements were identified which collectively aired 13,675 times during the 65 day monitoring period, with Archive staff scoring them for the time each devoted to supporting, attacking, and defending a candidate.  A combination of human review and computerized analysis was used to identify every broadcast of each of the 74 ads over the 65 days, along with the sponsor paying for that particular airing.  The end result is an interactive visualization that allows you to explore the television advertising landscape of Philadelphia last fall, comparing any pair of candidates, parties, races, status, win/lost, sponsor, sponsor type, television channel, or even keywords found in the transcripts, or any combination therein.  The ability to exhaustively identify every single airing of a political advertisement during the key campaigning period and determine who paid for each broadcast offers an incredible new tool for understanding the impact of media and money in the political campaigning process.

For example, you can compare ads focusing on Tom Corbett that were paid by Tom Corbett for Governor vs those paid for by Tom Wolf for Governor. Or, compare all ads mentioning the two candidates from any sponsor.  Or ads focusing on candidates that ultimately won vs lost. Or, compare the ads run by the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers vs those run by the House Majority PAC. Or, those mentioning “school” vs “job” in the transcript of the ad. Or, simply, view the overall trends for all 13,675 advertisement airings.

A New Approach to Measuring Virality on Television: State of the Union 2015

sotutvanalysis

Turning from local to national television, the second visualization explores how American and select international television excerpted and discussed the President’s January 20, 2015 State of the Union (SOTU) speech.  The social media era has profoundly altered the political communications landscape, ushering in a fixation on tracking emerging political “memes” and which pieces of political discourse are “going viral” at the moment.  Yet, we lack metrics for measuring what “goes viral” on television – a critical gap considering that television is still a dominate source of political news for 37% to 60% of Americans.  Thus, the “State of the Union 2015: Tracking ‘Going Viral’ on Television” project was born to prototype a brand-new way of tracking “memes” on television – the ability to take a speech or other television show, select a short clip of it, and instantly see every instance of that clip that was aired anywhere across the landscape of the world’s television monitored by the Archive.

Using the audfprint tool developed by Dan Ellis at the Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio at Columbia University, the 2015 State of the Union speech was broken into sentence-long soundbites, with each soundbite scanned against all news television shows archived by the Internet Archive from the evening of the January 20, 2015 speech through February 4, 2015 (two weeks later). The non-commercial audfprint tool scans the audio track of each show, so it is not dependent on closed captioning, which is extremely noisy and entirely absent from many foreign language broadcasts.  The tool is also extremely sensitive, able to detect brief excerpts even when they are overdubbed by a commentator and/or other sound effects. In total, 13,082 news shows totaling 649 hours of programming were scanned, and excluding “gavel-to-gavel” coverage (broadcasting the entire speech from start to finish), 208 distinct shows played an excerpt from the speech over 524 broadcasts.  An interactive visualization allows you to scroll through the speech passage by passage to see how each was excerpted and discussed and you can even watch short preview clips of each mention.

What you are seeing here is a first glimpse of a whole new way of exploring television, using enormously powerful computer algorithms as a new lens through which to explore the Internet Archive’s massive archive of television news.

Political Ads Win Over News 45 to 1 in Philly TV News 2014

[press: Columbia Journalism Review, USA Today, BloombergPolitics, Washington Post]

Study finds 842 minutes of political Ads compared to 18.7 minutes of political news stories in large sample of Philadelphia TV news programs archived by the Internet Archive in a joint project.

In the closing eight weeks of the 2014 campaign, political candidates and outside groups bombarded viewers of Philadelphia’s major TV stations with nearly 12,000 ads designed to sway voters in the Nov. 4 elections. But the stations that benefited from political advertisers’ $14 million spending spree also appear to have devoted little time to political journalism. A study of a representative sampling of newscasts on those stations put the ratio of time devoted to political advertising and spent on substantive political news stories at 45:1.

Political Ads & Local TV News – Philly 2014, by Danilo Yanich

These are the findings of a University of Delaware team lead by Associate Professor Danilo Yanich. The university’s Center for Community Research and Service researchers collaborated with the Internet Archive, The Sunlight Foundation, and the Committee of Seventy – the 100+ year-old Philadelphia-based political watchdog organization.

Our joint pilot project, Philly Political Media Watch, worked to open a library of all television news from stations based in and around Philadelphia and index the political ads presented in their newscasts. The ads were joined with information on who paid how much for them.  The Sunlight Foundation was able to unearth those financial data from being buried in PDF disclosures every TV stations is required to submit to the Federal Communications Commission. The experimental project was supported by individual contributors and grants from the Democracy Fund and the Rita Allen Foundation.

Philly TV Market AreaThe Philadelphia television market was chosen as a 2014 laboratory to experiment how the interaction between news media and political money; to learn lessons that could be taken to scale across the nation in 2016. The Philadelphia region is the nation’s 4th largest TV market, 19% African American, and includes parts of three states. In 2014, important contests in the region included races for: Pennsylvania governor, a Delaware U.S. Senate seat, two open congressional seats in New Jersey and an open state Senate seat in suburban Philadelphia.

The six major Philadelphia metro TV stations carried 8,003 political ads in their news broadcasts between September 8 and Election Day. As Yanich’s report notes, political strategists have long acknowledged that they try to place ads during or near news programming because it attracts the highest proportion of likely voters.

Here is a sample program from the Delaware study.  This 60-minute WCAU, a NBC affiliate, program aired at 5:00pm the day before the elections.  It offered two substantive political stories.  One about election day poll hours and the other about the leading candidates for governor commenting on their attack ads.  Good set up.  Questions of incumbent elicit an unequivocal assessment of opponent’s assertions.   Followed by other candidate asked if his ads are negative.  Seemingly timely and germane.  Quiz: Can you find WCAU’s mistake followed sometime later by an unacknowledged correction?

Although WCAU clearly addressed important election issues, that same 60 minute program was also stuffed with 24 political ads.  Here is one, below.  Quiz: Can you spot the word “EBOLA”?  And for extra credit: which is more toxic to our Republic, this kind of ad or the disease?

Although local TV station marketing directors are more than happy to accommodate the needs of political ad buyers, the  local news directors appear to take a less supportive view of their audience’s interest in politics. Yanich and his research team looked at a representative sample of the news programs (390 of 1,256) and found politics taking a back seat to other types of stories in terms both of time and placement in the broadcast. The Delaware researchers found that many of the political stories aired were blandly informational, describing candidate schedules or appearances. Isolating political stories that focused on substantive political issues, Yanich’s team found that during the broadcasts they analyzed, there 18.7 minutes of those stories, compared to 842 minutes of political ads, a ratio of 45:1.

Next Steps

With so much heat, where will citizens find the light they need to navigate through this onslaught of political messaging?

Internet_Archive 2016 Political Ad TrackerThe Internet Archive has begun to welcome new collaborators to join us in tackling the challenge of creating timely information resources for the 2016 U.S. election cycles. Data individuals and civic organizations can trust when considering how to participate in some of their community’s most important decision making. Reliable information they can use to hold television stations accountable for the choices they make in balancing obligations to serve the information needs of their communities and the allure of one of their biggest revenues sources: political advertising.

How might we better inform voters and increase civic participation before, during and after elections?

 

 

Announcing: A Brave New Feature for TV News V2.1

The new TV News Archive, launched just over one month ago, was updated today with the addition of a super new feature: Search Inside shows.

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It sounds simple enough for those familiar with the ubiquitous keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F…but it turns out that’s actually only 10% of you! So why use this feature when you’re browsing the TV News Archive of 500,000+ US TV News Shows? Several reasons:

1) More Better Context – The TV New search inside feature enables users to discover a word or combination of words within a show by highlighting the desired term in every segment where it occurs in a show. Furthermore, for every 1 minute segment where a term occurs, all accompanying closed captioning text is surfaced!
2) Less Background Noise – Columns of 1 minute segments that don’t contain a “search inside” term collapse so you can find exactly what you need faster.
3) Remedies the “Refer Problem” – About 80% of the time a user is referred to a TV News show page from a third party search engine, the user’s original search term doesn’t carryover. In other words, you land on a show page with zero terms highlighted, and that’s annoying. While we can’t exactly solve this problem, we can prescribe medication for the pain, “search inside.”

So now you know, go try it out for yourself! Here are just a couple amazing projects made possible by TV News, get inspired and show us how this tool helps you. Screen Shot 2014-05-03 at 12.13.25 PM

Why Cable TV Is Dying and Twitter is Winning | André-Pierre du Plessis, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism

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Tiny Numbers | Bodo Winter, UC Merced Cognitive Sciences 

— the  team

Introducing the New TV News Archive

Announcing the launch of the fully redesigned TV News Archive.

This research library, originally released in September 2012, is a free service provided as a way to enhance the capabilities of journalists, scholars, teachers, librarians, civic organizations and other engaged citizens. It repurposes closed captioning to enable users to search, quote and borrow from the Internet Archive’s collection of 500,000+ US TV news broadcasts aired since 2009.

The new interface has been designed to give users better access to this collection, and to provide new tools that enable users to share short clips from any broadcast and track play and share statistics of those clips over time.

Here’s a quick overview of the site’s features; we hope they serve you well.

 

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Search transcripts of US TV news shows aired since 2009

  • Search with topical terms to return shows with corresponding transcripts. Remember, you are searching the words spoken in the show.
  • Use the advanced search tool (click the TV News_V2.0_Buttons_Final-10 2 1.38.34 PM 3 icon) to specify a network or show name, or sort your search results.
  • Refer to the TV News_V2.0_Buttons_Final-10 9 1.38.34 PM 2 “info” panel throughout the site for details about your search results, related topics and other stats.

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Scan and view show segments

  • Shows are presented in 60 second segments, each with a video and corresponding transcript text.
  • Scroll left and right to scan through segments of a show; search terms are highlighted in transcript text.
  • To search within a show transcript text try Ctrl + F ( TV News Launch Memo-02 + F on mac) to search inside the page. (scrollable transcripts are coming soon!)

 

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Share and embed short clips (aka quotes) from a show

  • Shareable quotes are limited to 60 seconds. Refine your quote selection by clicking the “Edit” button and dragging the  TV News_V2.0_Buttons_Final-10 6 1.38.34 PM 3   handles.
  • Click a social media button TV News_V2.0_Buttons_Final-10 14 (or 2x the embed button) to finalize and share your quote.
  • Your quote will be assigned a permalink. You can always come back to see it!

 

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Track popularity of show quotes shared over time

  • Quotes with a unique start and stop time within a show will be tracked to see how often they are re-shared or played.
  • View a specific quote by saving or sharing its unique permalink, or you can browse quotes from shows on the TV News Archive site by looking for the TV News_V2.0_Buttons_Final-10 6 1.38.34 PM 2icon.

 

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Borrow full shows on DVD

  • Borrow shows (click the TV News_V2.0_Buttons_Final-10 9 1.38.34 PMicon on any show detail page) from the Internet Archive library on a DVD-ROM for 30 days for a $25 processing fee.
  • Internet Archive does not sell or license this content. Please note that this is a copyrighted work and performance, copying, or sale, whether or not for profit, by the recipient is not authorized.

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Cheers, from the TV News Team!