Tag Archives: The Wall Street Journal

How to Use the Trump Archive to find TV news appearances, fact checks, and share clips

by Katie Dahl

The experimental Trump Archive, which we launched in January, is a collection of President Donald Trump’s appearances on TV news shows, including interviews, speeches, and press conferences dating back to 2009. Now largely hand-curated, the Trump Archive is a prototype of the type of collection on a public figure or topic possible to make with material from our library of TV news. We are starting to reach out to machine learning collaborators to develop tools to make it more efficient to create such collections, and we have plans to publish similar collections on the Congressional leadership on both sides of the party aisle.

The growing Trump Archive contains a lot of content–928 clips and counting–so we’ve put together some pointers and ideas for how to use the collection. 

Anna Wiener at The New Yorker used the Trump Archive for “immersion therapy: a means of overcoming shock through prolonged exposure,” while the The Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey A. Fowler proposed the Trump Archive could be used to hold politicians accountable by people doing own fact-checking: “At a time when facts are considered up for debate, there’s more value than ever in being able to check the tape yourself.”

Fact-checking in the Trump Archive

The Trump Archive is a great place to spend time if you’re hungry for aggregated fact-checking and added context around President Trump’s statements. We incorporate fact checks from our partners at FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker in a variety of ways.

From this page you can explore TV programs that include at least one fact-checked Trump statement. After choosing a program, look for the fact-checked icon   on the program timeline. When you click on that icon, you’ll be able to watch the video of the statement and then click through to a fact-checking article by one of our partners.

And if you’re eager to look for a specific topic, such as “terrorism,” or “immigration,” this table is a great place to start. You can search for a topic using the trusty find function on your computer, or download the table and view the list as a spreadsheet. Find a list of topics at PolitiFact and FactCheck.org.

Search the Trump Archive

The search function, on the left side of the screen on the front page of the Trump Archive, allows you to find words or phrases within the closed captioning for a particular clip. Since those transcribers are working in real-time and at lightening speed, the captions don’t produce a perfect transcript, but they will get you really close to where you need to be.

For example, I searched for “believe me” in the Trump Archive and came up with hundreds of results. While that particular example may only be useful for artists and linguists, the functionality can be applied in many ways. For example, there are almost 200 results for a search of “Iran Deal,” 70+ results for “radical Islamic terrorists,” and when you search “jobs,” the results almost match the number in our total collection, revealing how often Donald Trump talks about jobs.

When we heard the President would be taking action to remove an expansion of rights for the transgender community, we looked for what he may have said about it before by searching “transgender” in the caption search. It yielded six programs in which he spoke publicly about it.

Because of the imperfect nature of closed captioning transcripts, your search is often more successful if you don’t try for an exact quote. For example, you may know Trump said something like “we can make the kind of change together that you dream of.” The closed captioning quote may actually be “an make the find a change together that you beam of.” But in those circumstances where you need to search for an exact quote, try using this, ~0. For example, “the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe”~0  . The ~0 tells the search box to look for all these words without any other words in between them, thus next to each other.

Browse the Trump Archive by TV show

If you know the program name of the Trump statement you’re looking for, you can use the “Topics & Subjects” filter on the left side navigation. So for instance, you may recall that Trump said something you want to find on an episode of 60 Minutes. Find Topics & Subjects on the left side of the page and click on “More.”

Then check the boxes of the relevant program(s), in this case, 60 Minutes. Hit “apply your filters,” and then browse all the 60 Minutes programs in the Trump Archive.

Make your own shareable TV clips

Once you find that video clip where Trump says something you want to share, you can make your own video clip of up to three minutes that can be easily embedded into a post. If you post the link on twitter, the clip appears within the body of the tweet and can be played without clicking through to the TV News Archive.

To start, click on the icon to “Share, embed or refine this clip!” 

A window will then open up to present (highlighted in orange) the closed captioning of the 60-second pre-defined segment—and the captioning of the 60 seconds before and after (not highlighted) for context. Important: the captions come from real-time closed captioning, which means they are often incomplete, garbled and not precisely aligned. This is all still an experiment, remember. Be sure to watch your clip before you post to make sure you captured what you meant to.

“Grab” the quote marks at the beginning and end of the highlighted segment and through a bit of trial and error, find the right in and out points for the clip. Note that each time the quote marks move, the player starts to play and the URL changes to update the “start” and “end” points of the clip — named to reflect the number of seconds into the entire program. Remember: Watch your clip before you post.

Pro tip: If you clip a quote that’s fewer than 10 seconds it might not play, so give it a bit of time to run. Copy the URL and paste it elsewhere. Click one of the variety of share method icons on the bottom of the edit window (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) The embed icon </> will offer two flavors of embed codes for the portion you have selected—one for an iFrame, the other for many WordPress sites.

Fun, right? Now go share another. Let us know if you have any questions by emailing us at politicalad@archive.org; and please, do share what uses you find for the Trump Archive.

 

 

In the news: Trump Archive, end-of-term preservation, & link rot

News outlets have been getting the word out on Internet Archive efforts to preserve President-elect Donald Trump’s statements; the outgoing Obama Administration’s web page and government data; as well as preventing that nasty experience of encountering a “404” when you click on a link online, aka “link rot.”

Trump Archive 

A number of journalists have been exploring the riches contained within the newly launched Trump Archive, a TV news clips of the president-elect speaking peppered with links to more than 500 fact checks by national fact-checking groups.

Annie Wiener, writing for The New Yorker, immerses herself in Trump statements and discovers 56 mentions of the escalator in Trump tower, and that Trump:

“is a fan of the word “sleaze,” and of the phrase “tough cookie,” which he has used to describe policemen, his opponents’ political donors, Paul LePage, “real-estate guys in New York and elsewhere,” an unnamed friend who is a “great financial guy,” isis, three professional football players, Reince Priebus, Lyndon Johnson, and Trump’s father, Fred. After watching long stretches of video, she writes, “It occurred to me that spending time online in the Trump Archive could be a form of immersion therapy: a means of overcoming shock through prolonged exposure.”

Geoffrey Fowler, tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal, bemoans the lack of easy-to-use tech tools to help people be responsible citizens overall, but also notes the promise–and challenge–of a curated collection like the Trump Archive:

“The Trump Archive shows what’s hard about using tech to hold officials accountable. It’s assembled and hand-curated by humans. Yet even using the transcripts, it can be hard to tell the difference between a spoken name and a person who’s actually speaking. Archive officials say making their database applicable to hundreds or thousands more politicians would require help from tech firms with capabilities in machine learning and voice and facial recognition.”

Fowler also published this video, featuring plenty of Trump, an interview with Roger Macdonald, director of the TV News Archive; and ample footage of the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters.

The Trump Archive also was featured in Marketplace Tech®, The HillForbesNewsweek, Buzzfeed News TechPlzVentureBeat, engadgetand more.

Preserving Obama Administration websites, social media

The Internet Archive’s efforts to help preserve government websites via the Wayback Machine during and after the transition has continued to garner attention. Wired reports on a group of climate scientists working against the clock to archive government websites related to global warming:

One half was setting web crawlers upon NOAA web pages that could be easily copied and sent to the Internet Archive. The other was working their way through the harder-to-crack data sets—the ones that fuel pages like the EPA’s incredibly detailed interactive map of greenhouse gas emissions, zoomable down to each high-emitting factory and power plant.

The New Scientist also writes on efforts to archive climate data:

Fears that data could be misused or altered have prompted crowd-sourcing to back up federal climate and environmental data, including Climate Mirror, a distributed volunteer effort supported by the Internet Archive and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto.

The Los Angeles Times and Quartz offer reports on archiving climate data.

Internet Archive works against link rot

Tech publications were quick to inform their readers about the Internet Archive’s new chrome extension that fights link rot by directing users to archived web pages. Here is Mashable:

Now Internet Archive has built a Wayback Machine Chrome extension. It works like this: If you click on a link that would normally lead to an error page (think 404), the extension will instead give users the option to load an archived version of the page. The link is no longer simply gone.

Also writing on the fight against link rot: NetworkWorldVenture BeatThe Tech PortalBleeping Computer, and ZDNet.