Tag Archives: research

A New Approach To Understanding War Through Television News: Introducing The TV News Visual Explorer & The Belarusian, Russian & Ukrainian TV News Archive

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For more than 20 years, the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive has monitored television news, preserving more than 9.5 million broadcasts totaling more than 6.6 million hours from across the world, with a continuous archive spanning the past decade. Today just a small sliver of that archive is accessible to journalists and scholars due to the inaccessibility of video at this scale: fast forwarding through that much television news is simply beyond the ability of any human to make sense of. The small fraction of programs that contain closed captioning, speech recognition transcripts or OCR’d onscreen text can be keyword searched through the TV Explorer and TV AI Explorer, but for the majority of this global multi-decade archive, there has until now been no way for researchers to assess and understand the narratives of television news at scale, especially the visual landscape that distinguishes television from other forms of media and which is so central to understanding many of the world’s biggest stories from war to pandemics to the economy.

As the TV News Archive enters its third decade, it is increasingly exploring the ways in which it can preserve the domestic and international response to global events as it did with 9/11 two decades ago. As a first step towards this vision, over the last few months the Archive has preserved more than 46,000 broadcasts from domestic Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian television news channels, including (in the order they were added to the Archive) Russia Today (part of the Archive since July 2010 but included in this collection starting January 1), Russian channels 1TV, NTV and Russia 1 (from March 26) and Russia 24 (from April 25), Ukrainian channel Espreso (from April 25) and Belarusian channel Belarus 24 (from May 16).

Why preserve television news coverage in a time of war? For journalists today it makes it possible to digest and report on how the war is being framed and narrated, with an eye towards how these narratives influence and shape popular support for the conflict and its potential future trajectory. For future generations of scholars, it makes it possible to look back at the contemporary information environment and prevailing public information, perspectives, and narratives.

While there are myriad options for the general public to watch these channels today in realtime, there is no research-oriented archival interface designed for journalists and scholars to understand their coverage at the scale of days to months, to scan for key visuals and events and to comment, discuss and illustrate how nations are portraying major stories.

To address this critical need, today we are tremendously excited to unveil the Television News Visual Explorer, a collaboration of the GDELT Project, the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive and the Media-Data Research Consortium to explore new approaches to enabling rapid exploration and understanding of the visual landscape of television news.

The Visual Explorer converts each broadcast into a grid of thumbnails, one every 4 seconds, displayed in a grid six frames wide and scrolling vertically through the entire program, making it possible to skim an hour-long broadcast in a matter of seconds. Clicking on any thumbnail plays a brief 30 second clip of the broadcast at that point, making it trivial to rapidly triage a broadcast for key moments. The underlying thumbnails can even be downloaded as a ZIP file to enable non-consumptive computational analysis, from OCR to augmented search.

Machines today can catalog the basic objects and activities they see in video and generate transcripts of their spoken and written words, but the ability to contextualize and understand the meaning of all that coverage remains a uniquely human capability. No person could watch the entirety of the Archive’s 6.6 million hours of broadcasts, yet even just the 46,000 broadcasts in this new collection would be difficult for a single researcher to watch or even fast forward through in their entirety. Television’s linear format means coverage has historically been consumed a single moment at a time like a flashlight in a darkened warehouse. In contrast, this new interface makes it possible to see an entire broadcast all at once in a single display, making television news “skimmable” for the first time.

The Visual Explorer and this new research collection of Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian television news coverage represent early glimpses into a new initiative reimagining how memory institutions like the Archive can make their vast television news archives more accessible to scholars, journalists and informed citizens. Beneath the simple and intuitive interface lies an immensely complex and highly experimental set of workflows prototyping both an entirely new scholarly and journalistic interface to television news and entirely new approaches to rapidly archiving international television coverage of global events.

Over the coming weeks, additional channels from the TV News Archive will become available through the new Visual Explorer, as well as a variety of experiments with the new lenses that tools like automatic transcription and translation can offer in helping journalists and scholars make sense of such vast realtime archives.

Get Started With The Television News Visual Explorer!

About Kalev Leetaru

For more than 25 years, GDELT’s creator, Dr. Kalev H. Leetaru, has been studying the web and building systems to interact with and understand the way it is reshaping our global society. One of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013, his work has been featured in the presses of over 100 nations and fundamentally changed how we think about information at scale and how the “big data” revolution is changing our ability to understand our global collective consciousness.

Radio Ngrams Dataset Allows New Research into Public Health Messaging

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Guest post by Dr. Kalev Leetaru

Radio remains one of the most-consumed forms of traditional media today, with 89% of Americans listening to radio at least once a week as of 2018, a number that is actually increasing during the pandemic. News is the most popular radio format and 60% of Americans trust radio news to “deliver timely information about the current COVID-19 outbreak.”

Local talk radio is home to a diverse assortment of personality-driven programming that offers unique insights into the concerns and interests of citizens across the nation. Yet radio has remained stubbornly inaccessible to scholars due to the technical challenges of monitoring and transcribing broadcast speech at scale.

Debuting this past July, the Internet Archive’s Radio Archive uses automatic speech recognition technology to transcribe this vast collection of daily news and talk radio programming into searchable text dating back to 2016, and continues to archive and transcribe a selection of stations through present, making them browsable and keyword searchable.

Ngrams data set

Building on this incredible archive, the GDELT Project and I have transformed this massive archive into a research dataset of radio news ngrams spanning 26 billion English language words across portions of 550 stations, from 2016 to the present.

You can keyword search all 3 million shows, but for researchers interested in diving into the deeper linguistic patterns of radio news, the new ngrams dataset includes 1-5grams at 10 minute resolution covering all four years and updated every 30 minutes. For those less familiar with the concept of “ngrams,” they are word frequency tables in which the transcript of each broadcast is broken into words and for each 10 minute block of airtime a list is compiled of all of the words spoken in those 10 minutes for each station and how many times each word was mentioned.

Some initial research using these ngrams

How can researchers use this kind of data to understand new insights into radio news?

The graph below looks at pronoun usage on BBC Radio 4 FM, comparing the percentage of words spoken each day that were either (“we”, “us”, “our”, “ours”, “ourselves”) or (“i”, “me”, “i’m”). “Me” words are used more than twice as often as “we” words but look closely at February of 2020 as the pandemic began sweeping the world and “we” words start increasing as governments began adopting language to emphasize togetherness.

“We” (orange) vs. “Me” (blue) words on BBC Radio 4 FM, showing increase of “we” words beginning in February 2020 as Covid-19 progresses

TV vs. Radio

Combined with the television news ngrams that I previously created, it is possible to compare how topics are being covered across television and radio.

The graph below compares the percentage of spoken words that mentioned Covid-19 since the start of this year across BBC News London (television) versus radio programming on BBC World Service (international focus) and BBC Radio 4 FM (domestic focus).

All three show double surges at the start of the year as the pandemic swept across the world, a peak in early April and then a decrease since. Yet BBC Radio 4 appears to have mentioned the pandemic far less than the internationally-focused BBC World Service, though the two are now roughly equal even as the pandemic has continued to spread. Over all, television news has emphasized Covid-19 more than radio.  

Covid-19 mentions on Television vs. Radio. The chart compares BBC News London (TV) in blue, versus BBC World Service (Radio) in orange and BBC Radio 4 FM (Radio) in grey.

For now, you can download the entire dataset to explore on your own computer but there will also be an interactive visualization and analysis interface available sometime in mid-Spring.

It is important to remember that these transcripts are generated through computer speech recognition, so are imperfect transcriptions that do not properly recognize all words or names, especially rare or novel terms like “Covid-19,” so experimentation may be required to yield the best results.

The graphs above just barely scratch the surface of the kinds of questions that can now be explored through the new radio news ngrams, especially when coupled with television news and 152-language online news ngrams.

From transcribing 3 million radio broadcasts into ngrams to describing a decade of television news frame by frame, cataloging the objects and activities of half a billion online news images, to inventorying the tens of billions of entities and relationships in half a decade of online journalism, it is becoming increasingly possible to perform multimodal analysis at the scale of entire archives.

Researchers can ask questions that for the first time simultaneously look across audio, video, imagery and text to understand how ideas, narratives, beliefs and emotions diffuse across mediums and through the global news ecosystem. Helping to seed the future of such at-scale research, the Internet Archive and GDELT are collaborating with a growing number of media archives and researchers through the newly formed Media Data Research Consortium to better understand how critical public health messaging is meeting the challenges of our current global pandemic.

About Kalev Leetaru

For more than 25 years, GDELT’s creator, Dr. Kalev H. Leetaru, has been studying the web and building systems to interact with and understand the way it is reshaping our global society. One of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013, his work has been featured in the presses of over 100 nations and fundamentally changed how we think about information at scale and how the “big data” revolution is changing our ability to understand our global collective consciousness.

Archive-It and Archives Unleashed Join Forces to Scale Research Use of Web Archives

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Archived web data and collections are increasingly important to scholarly practice, especially to those scholars interested in data mining and computational approaches to analyzing large sets of data, text, and records from the web. For over a decade Internet Archive has worked to support computational use of its web collections through a variety of services, from making raw crawl data available to researchers, performing customized extraction and analytic services supporting network or language analysis, to hosting web data hackathons and having dataset download features in our popular suite of web archiving services in Archive-It. Since 2016, we have also collaborated with the Archives Unleashed project to support their efforts to build tools, platforms, and learning materials for social science and humanities scholars to study web collections, including those curated by the 700+ institutions using Archive-It. 

We are excited to announce a significant expansion of our partnership. With a generous award of $800,000 (USD) to the University of Waterloo from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Archives Unleashed and Archive-It will broaden our collaboration and further integrate our services to provide easy-to-use, scalable tools to scholars, researchers, librarians, and archivists studying and stewarding web archives.  Further integration of Archives Unleashed and Archive-It’s Research Services (and IA’s Web & Data Services more broadly) will simplify the ability of scholars to analyze archived web data and give digital archivists and librarians expanded tools for making their collections available as data, as pre-packaged datasets, and as archives that can be analyzed computationally. It will also offer researchers a best-of-class, end-to-end service for collecting, preserving, and analyzing web-published materials.

The Archives Unleashed team brings together a team of co-investigators.  Professor Ian Milligan, from the University of Waterloo’s Department of History, Jimmy Lin, Professor and Cheriton Chair at Waterloo’s Cheriton School of Computer Science, and Nick Ruest, Digital Assets Librarian in the Digital Scholarship Infrastructure department of York University Libraries, along with Jefferson Bailey, Director of Web Archiving & Data Services at the Internet Archive, will all serve as co-Principal Investigators on the “Integrating Archives Unleashed Cloud with Archive-It” project. This project represents a follow-on to the Archives Unleashed project that began in 2017, also funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“Our first stage of the Archives Unleashed Project,” explains Professor Milligan, “built a stand-alone service that turns web archive data into a format that scholars could easily use. We developed several tools, methods and cloud-based platforms that allow researchers to download a large web archive from which they can analyze all sorts of information, from text and network data to statistical information. The next logical step is to integrate our service with the Internet Archive, which will allow a scholar to run the full cycle of collecting and analyzing web archival content through one portal.”

“Researchers, from both the sciences and the humanities, are finally starting to realize the massive trove of archived web materials that can support a wide variety of computational research,” said Bailey. “We are excited to scale up our collaboration with Archives Unleashed to make the petabytes of web and data archives collected by Archive-It partners and other web archiving institutions around the world more useful for scholarly analysis.” 

The project begins in July 2020 and will begin releasing public datasets as part of the integration later in the year. Upcoming and future work includes technical integration of Archives Unleashed and Archive-It, creation and release of new open-source tools, datasets, and code notebooks, and a series of in-person “datathons” supporting a cohort of scholars using archived web data and collections in their data-driven research and analysis. We are grateful to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their support of this integration and collaboration in support of critical infrastructure supporting computational scholarship and its use of the archived web.

Primary contacts:
IA – Jefferson Bailey, Director of Web Archiving & Data Services, jefferson [at] archive.org
AU – Ian Milligan, Professor of History, University of Waterloo, i2milligan [at] uwaterloo.ca

Internet Archive and Center for Open Science Collaborate to Preserve Open Science Data

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Open Science and research reproducibility rely on ongoing access to research data. With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ National Leadership Grants for Libraries program, the Internet Archive (IA) and Center for Open Science (COS) will work together to ensure that open data related to the scientific research process is archived for perpetual access, redistribution, and reuse. The project aims to leverage the intersection between open research data, the long-term stewardship activities of libraries, and distributed data sharing and preservation networks. By focusing on these three areas of work, the project will test and implement infrastructure for improved data sharing in further support of open science and data curation. Building out interoperability between open data platforms like the Open Science Framework (OSF) of COS, large scale digital archives like IA, and collaborative preservation networks has the potential to enable more seamless distribution of open research data and enable new forms of custody and use. See also the press release from COS announcing this project.

OSF supports the research lifecycle by enabling researchers to produce and manage registrations and data artifacts for further curation to foster adoption and discovery. The Internet Archive works with 700+ institutions to collect, archive, and provide access to born-digital and web-published resources and data. Preservation at IA of open data on OSF will enable further availability of this data to other preservation networks and curatorial partners for distributed long term stewardship and local custody by research institutions using both COS and IA services. The project will also partner with a number of preservation networks and repositories to mirror portions of this data and test additional interoperability among additional stewardship organizations and digital preservation systems.

Beyond the prototyping and technical work of data archiving, the teams will also be conducting training, including the development of open education resources, webinars, and similar materials to ensure data librarians can incorporate the project deliverables into their local research data management workflows. The two-year project will first focus on OSF Registrations data and expand to include other open access materials hosted on OSF. Later stage work will test interoperable approaches to sharing subsets of this data with other preservation networks such as LOCKSS, AP Trust, and individual university libraries. Together, IA and COS aim to lay the groundwork for seamless technical integration supporting the full lifecycle of data publishing, distribution, preservation, and perpetual access.

Project contacts:
IA – Jefferson Bailey, Director of Web Archiving & Data Services, jefferson [at] archive.org
COS – Nici Pfeiffer, Director of Product, nici [at] cos.io

Internet Archive Partners with University of Edinburgh to Provide Historical Web Data Supporting Machine Translation

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The Internet Archive will provide portions of its web archive to the University of Edinburgh to support the School of Informatics’ work building open data and tools for advancing machine translation, especially for low-resource languages. Machine translation is the process of automatically converting text in one language to another.

The ParaCrawl project is mining translated text from the web in 29 languages.  With over 1 million translated sentences available for several languages, ParaCrawl is often the largest open collection of translations for each language.   The project is a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, University of Alicante, Prompsit, TAUS, and Omniscien with funding from the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility.  Internet Archive data is vastly expanding the data mined by ParaCrawl and therefore the amount of translated sentences collected. Lead by Kenneth Heafield of the University of Edinburgh, the overall project will yield open corpora and open-source tools for machine translation as well as the processing pipeline.  

Archived web data from IA’s general web collections will be used in the project.  Because translations are particularly scarce for Icelandic, Croatian, Norwegian, and Irish, the IA will also use customized internal language classification tools to prioritize and extract data in these languages from archived websites in its collections.

The partnership expands on IA’s ongoing effort to provide computational research services to large-scale data mining projects focusing on open-source technical developments for furthering the public good and open access to information and data. Other recent collaborations include providing web data for assessing the state of local online news nationwide, analyzing historical corporate industry classifications, and mapping online social communities. As well, IA is expanding its work in making available custom extractions and datasets from its 20+ years of historical web data. For further information on IA’s web and data services, contact webservices at archive dot org.

Hacking Web Archives

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The awkward teenage years of the web archive are over. It is now 27 years since Tim Berners-Lee created the web and 20 years since we at Internet Archive set out to systematically archive web content. As the web gains evermore “historicity” (i.e., it’s old and getting older — just like you!), it is increasingly recognized as a valuable historical record of interest to researchers and others working to study it at scale.

Thus, it has been exciting to see — and for us to support and participate in — a number of recent efforts in the scholarly and library/archives communities to hold hackathons and datathons focused on getting web archives into the hands of research and users. The events have served to help build a collaborative framework to encourage more use, more exploration, more tools and services, and more hacking (and similar levels of the sometime-maligned-but-ever-valuable yacking) to support research use of web archives. Get the data to the people!

pngl3s_hackathon_postFirst, in May, in partnership with the Alexandria Project of L3S at University of Hannover in Germany, we helped sponsor “Exploring the Past of the Web: Alexandria & Archive-It Hackathon” alongside the Web Science 2016 conference. Over 15 researchers came together to analyze almost two dozen subject-based web archives created by institutions using our Archive-It service. Universities, archives, museums, and others contributed web archive collections on topics ranging from the Occupy Movement to Human Rights to Contemporary Women Artists on the Web. Hackathon teams geo-located IP addresses, analyzed sentiments and entities in webpage text, and studied mime type distributions.

unleashed attendeesunleashed_vizSimilarly, in June, our friends at Library of Congress hosted the second Archives Unleashed  datathon, a follow-on to a previous event held at University of Toronto in March 2016. The fantastic team organizing these two Archives Unleashed hackathons have created an excellent model for bringing together transdisciplinary researchers and librarians/archivists to foster work with web data. In both Archives Unleashed events, attendees formed into self-selecting teams to work together on specific analytical approaches and with specific web archive collections and datasets provided by Library of Congress, Internet Archive, University of Toronto, GWU’s Social Feed Manager, and others. The #hackarchives tweet stream gives some insight into the hacktivities, and the top projects were presented at the Save The Web symposium held at LC’s Kluge Center the day after the event.

Both events show a bright future for expanding new access models, scholarship, and collaborations around building and using web archives. Plus, nobody crashed the wi-fi at any of these events! Yay!

Special thanks go to Altiscale (and Start Smart Labs) and ComputeCanada for providing cluster computing services to support these events. Thanks also go to the multiple funding agencies, including NSF and SSHRC, that provided funding, and to the many co-sponsoring and hosting institutions. Super special thanks go to key organizers, Helge Holzman and Avishek Anand at L3S and Matt Weber, Ian Milligan, and Jimmy Lin at Archives Unleashed, who made these events a rollicking success.

For those interested in participating in a web archives hackathon/datathon, more are in the works, so stay tuned to the usual social media channels. If you are interested in helping host an event, please let us know. Lastly, for those that can’t make an event, but are interested in working with web archives data, check out our Archives Research Services Workshop.

Lastly, some links to blog posts, projects, and tools from these events:

Some related blog posts:

Some hackathon projects:

Some web archive analysis tools:

Here’s to more happy web archives hacking in the future!