Today, Kalev and Roger Macdonald, founder of the Internet Archive TV News Archive, will talk about how the ways in which the TV News Archive has become a platform for everything from new approaches to interactive search to at-scale non-consumptive multimodal research:
How can treating television news as data create fundamentally new kinds of opportunities for both computational analysis of influential societal narratives and the creation of new kinds of interactive search tools? How could derived (non-consumptive) metadata be open-access and respectful of content creator concerns? How might specific segments be contextualized by linking them to related analysis, like professional journalist fact checking? How can tools like OCR, AI language analysis and knowledge graphs generate terabytes of annotations making it possible to search television news in powerful new ways?
For nearly a decade, the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive has enabled closed captioning keyword search of a growing archive that today spans nearly three million hours of U.S. local and national TV news (2,239,000+ individual shows) from mid-2009 to the present. This public interest library is dedicated to facilitating journalists, scholars, and the public to compare, contrast, cite, and borrow specific portions of the collection. Using a range of algorithmic approaches, users are moving beyond simple captioning search towards rich analysis of the visual side of television news.