We're tremendously excited to announce the latest iteration of the 2016 Television Candidate Tracker! The biggest change is that we are now integrating all 100 stations in 20 television markets in 8 US states that the Internet Archive's Television News Archive is now monitoring. These are available as "Affiliates" options under the "Television Network" dropdown. The original "National Networks" collection remains unchanged, but there are now numerous Affiliates options, allowing you to select any of the current markets being monitored by the Archive.
Note that the new affiliates will only go back to the start of February 2016 at earliest, since we just added them and as new ones come online over the coming year, they will each have their own start dates, so caution is suggested when comparing Affiliate results over time to ensure that the set of stations under that affiliate option (market/network) has not changed dramatically over the period of interest.
We've also added several new "Time Period" options, allowing you to narrow to the last 180, 90 and 60 days in addition to the previous 30 days.
Since we've received a number of questions about this, we would like to remind users that this tracking system captures the actual raw number of times each candidate is mentioned. If a candidate is mentioned 20 times in a single show, it will be captured here as 20 mentions. This is in stark contrast to the Television News Archive's main keyword search engine, which reports the number of shows mentioning a keyword, not the number of times the keyword was mentioned. If a candidate is mentioned 20 times in a show, the Archive's main keyword search engine will record that as a single show mentioning the candidate one or more times, while the candidate tracker here will record it as 20 mentions.
You can also now add "&output=csv" to the end of the URL to download the timeline data in CSV format for further statistical analysis. NOTE that the CSV will output the raw number of mentions of each candidate per day based on your current selected options (so it will reflect whether you are looking at National Networks, a particular affiliate, etc). Since the raw number of mentions of all candidates changes considerably day-to-day based on competing news stories and the weekly television cycle, we highly recommend normalizing the results by summing all mentions of all candidates each day and dividing each candidate over that total to represent the counts as percentages of all candidate mentions, which normalizes away these issues.
As always, email us at kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com with any questions. Permission is granted for any and all use of these graphs in media reports, please cite "Analysis by the GDELT Project using data from the Internet Archive Television News Archive."