Understanding Television News: Our Audiovisual Memory Institutions As Research Platforms

This past Thursday the Internet Archive held a virtual event "Reflecting on 9/11: Twenty Years of Archived TV News" that included presentations by the major US memory institutions devoted to preserving television news, including the Internet Archive's Television News ArchiveThe American Archive of Public BroadcastingThe Vanderbilt Television News Archive and UCLA Library’s NewsScape TV News Archive.

GDELT's Kalev Leetaru spoke briefly about a few of the myriad initiatives, datasets, tools, services and research efforts that underlie our collaborations with the Internet Archive's Television News Archive exploring ways of making these unique audiovisual archives analytically accessible to scholars, from keyword search of captioning and OCR'd onscreen text to more advanced forms of analysis, with the goal of allowing scholars to dive ever more richly into this largely untapped dimension of our national heritage and history that lies at the nexus of our societal understanding of the most important events of the past three quarters of a century. This is in addition to our work on transforming how we see web archives as research platforms.

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