Tag Archives: UCLA

Expanding the Television Archive

When we started archiving television in 2000, people shrugged and asked, “Why?  Isn’t it all junk anyway?” As the saying goes, one person’s junk is another person’s gold. From 2010-18, scholars, pundits and above all, reporters, have spun journalistic gold from the data captured in our 1.5 million hours of television news recordings. Our work has been fueled by visionary funders(1) who saw the potential impact of turning television – from news reports to political ads – into data that can be analyzed at scale. Now the Internet Archive is taking its Television Archive in new directions. In 2018 our goals for television will be: better curation in what we collect; broader collection across the globe; and working with computer scientists interested in exploring our huge data sets. Simply put, our mission is to build and preserve comprehensive collections of the world’s most important television programming and make them as accessible as possible to researchers and the general public. We will need your help.  

“Preserving TV news is critical, and at the Internet Archive we’ve decided to rededicate ourselves to growing our collection,” explained Roger MacDonald, Director of Television at the Internet Archive. “We plan to go wide, expanding our archives of global TV news from every continent. We also plan to go deep, gathering content from local markets around the country. And we plan to do so in a sustainable way that ensures that this TV will be available to generations to come.”

Libraries, museums and memory institutions have long played a critical role in preserving the cultural output of our creators. Television falls within that mandate. Indeed some of the most comprehensive US television collections are held by the Library of Congress, Vanderbilt University and UCLA. Now we’d like to engage with a broad range of libraries and memory institutions in the television collecting and curation process. If your organization has a mandate to collect television or researcher demand for this media, we would like to understand your needs and interests. The Internet Archive will undertake collection trials with interested institutions, with the eventual goal of making this work self-sustaining.

Simultaneously, we are looking to engage researchers interested in the non-consumptive analysis of television at scale, in ways that continue to respect the interests of right holders. The tools we’ve created may be useful. For instance, we hope the tools the Internet Archive used to detect TV campaign ads can be applied by researchers in new and different ways.  If your organization has interest in computing with television as data at large, we are interested in working with you.

This groundbreaking interface for searching television news, based on the closed captions associated with US broadcasts, was developed between 2009-2012.

A brief history of the Internet Archive’s Television collection:

2000 Working with pioneering engineer, Rod Hewitt, IA begins archiving 20 channels originating from many nations.

Oct. 2001 September 11, 2001 Collection established, and enhanced in 2011.

2009-2012 With funding from the Knight Foundation and many others, we built a service to allow public searching, citation and borrowing of US television news programs on DVD.

2012-2014 Public TV news library launched with tools to search, quote and share streamed snippets from television news.

2014 Pilot launched to detect political advertisements broadcast in the Philadelphia region, led to developing open sourced audio fingerprinting techniques.

2016 Political ad detection, curation, and access expanded to 28 battleground regions for 2016 elections, enabling journalists to fact check the ads and analyze the data at scale. The same tools helped reporters analyze presidential debates.  This resulted in front-page data visualizations in The New York Times, as well as 150+ analyses by news outlets from Fox News to The Economist to FiveThirtyEight.

2017-date Experiments with artificial intelligence techniques to employ facial identification, and on-screen optical character recognition to aid searching and data mining of television. Special curated collections of top political leaders and fact-check integrations.

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential elections, journalists at the NYT and elsewhere began analyzing television as data, in this case looking at the different sound bites each network chose to replay.

Embarking on a new direction also means shifting away from some of our current services. Our dedicated television team has been focusing on metadata enhancement and assisting journalists and scholars to use our data. We will be wrapping up some of these free services in the next three to four months.  We hope others will take up where we left off and build the tools that will make our collection even more valuable to the public.

Now more than ever in this era of disinformation, our world needs an open, reliable, canonical reference source of television news. This cannot exist without the diligent efforts of technologists, journalists, researchers, and television companies all working together to create a television archive open for all. We hope you will join us!

To learn more about the work of the TV News Archive outreach and metadata innovation team over the last few years, please see our blog posts.

(1) Funding for the Television Archive has come from diverse donors, including the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, Rita Allen Foundation, craigslist Charitable Fund and The Buck Foundation.

UCLA Brings Light to the Undiscovered Country of Television News

The UCLA Library recently launched a remarkable broadcast news  research and education platform, Broadcast NewsScape.   The service is accessible online to users on the UCLA campus.  Platform managers hope to expand access throughout the UC system later this year.  NewsScape captures closed captioning, in a manner similar to our TV News Search & Borrow, to facilitate deep search and discovery of relevant segments of over 200,000 U.S. and international news program episodes.

BroadcastNewsScape1We are excited that the UCLA library has joined Vanderbilt University and the Internet Archive in offering tailored research and public interest access to television news.  These successful demonstrations of responsibly providing public benefit access to television news are helping to enrich conversations regarding mutual benefits among media and library stakeholders.

UCLA has a storied history in archiving television news, starting with the 1974 Senate Watergate hearings.  Between 1979 and 2003, UCLA recorded off-air more than 100,000 news programs, preserving and making them accessible in UCLA’s Film & Television Archive’s News and Public Affairs Collection  In 2005, Communication Studies department professors Francis F. Steen and Tim Groeling brought UCLA’s television news archiving into the digital age, recording direct to disks and, most transformationally, preserving available closed captioning.  Their collection has enabled researches to experiment with new digital processes for analyzing attributes of broadcast news.

NewsScape_infrastructureLast year, the UCLA Library started making provisions to take the digital news archive under its wing, devoting considerable server resources and relieving Francis and Tim from their 8-year labor of love maintaining their modest, sometimes cantankerous, hardware and ever-growing data stores.

Thanks to the leadership of associate university librarians Todd Grappone and Sharon Farb, the UCLA Library’s newly launched Broadcast NewsScape tool is welcoming scholars, educators and students from throughout the university to delve deeply and and derive new insights from the undiscovered country that is television news.

UCLA’s announcement: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-library-launches-transformative-243873.aspx

Special Collections From the UCLA Scanning Center

More and more libraries are partnering with Archive.org to provide online access to their special collections. With this post we feature some of the fascinating collections made available online by the University of California Los Angeles

  • The UCLA Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale Collection:
    “This collection of books by and about Florence Nightingale was a gift from urologist Elmer Belt to UCLA’s Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library in 1958. The gift honored School of Nursing Dean Lulu Wolf Hassenplug for her successful creation of the school in 1948 and her direction of it through its first ten years at the University of California, Los Angeles. The books have a characteristic mid-Victorian appearance; they are not beautiful either in typography or binding but, with content reflecting the influence of Florence Nightingale, they are immensely rich in human value. The collection includes editions of Nightingale’s influential ‘Notes on Nursing’ (1859 and later) and her other publications as well as biographies and tributes.”
  • Carte Italiane:
    “Carte Italiane is a graduate student publication of the Italian Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since its inception in the 1979-1980 academic year, the journal has been dedicated to publishing the work of graduate students and professors in the field of Italian cultural studies.”
  • UCLA Yearbook:
    “In March 1881 the California State Legislature authorized the creation of a southern branch of the California State Normal School in downtown Los Angeles to train teachers for the growing population of Southern California. In 1887, the school became known as the Los Angeles State Normal School. In 1914, the school moved to a new campus on Vermont Avenue in Hollywood. In 1917, the school became the second University of California campus, after Berkeley. On May 23, 1919, Assembly Bill 626 became a law, which turned the campus into the Southern Branch of the University of California. Enrollment at the Southern Branch expanded so rapidly that by the mid-1920s the institution was outgrowing the 25 acre Vermont Avenue location. The Regents conducted a search for a new location and announced their selection of the so-called ‘Beverly Site’—just west of Beverly Hills—on March 21, 1925. In 1927, the Regents renamed the school itself the ‘University of California at Los Angeles’ and the state broke ground in Westwood.”
  • Paroles gelees : UCLA French studies:
    “Paroles gelées was established in 1983 by its founding editor, Kathryn Bailey. The journal is managed and edited by the French and Francophone Studies Graduate Students Association; fully funded by the UCLA Graduate Students Association; and published annually under the auspices of the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies.”
  • UCLA Children’s Book Collection:
    “Children’s literature emerged as a distinct and independent genre only a little more than two centuries ago. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, books were rarely created specifically for children, and children’s reading was generally confined to literature intended for their education and moral edification rather than for their amusement. Religious works, grammar books, and ‘courtesy books’ (which offered instruction on proper behavior) were virtually the only early books directed at children. In these books illustration played a relatively minor role, usually consisting of small woodcut vignettes or engraved frontispieces created by anonymous illustrators.
    New attitudes toward children and their education began to develop in the late seventeenth century, when many educators appealed for greater consideration of children’s distinctive needs and when the notion of pleasure in learning was becoming more widely accepted. By the early eighteenth century interest in children’s literature (and a rise in literacy) led to new markets and a flourishing of new publishers, particularly in England. Innovations in typography and printing allowed greater freedom in reproducing art through engraving, woodcut, etching, and aquatint, although illustrators were still largely anonymous and illustrations confined to frontispieces.”
  • –Cara Binder

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