Internet Archive data fuels journalists’ analyses of how TV news shows covered prez debate

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The presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on September 26 drew an audience of 84 million, shattering records. It was also a first for the Internet Archive, which made data publicly available, for free, on how TV news shows covered the debate. These data, generated by the Duplitron, the open source tool used to generate counts of ad airings for the Political TV Ad Archive, also is able to track coverage of specific video clips by TV news shows.

Download TV News Archive presidential debate data here.

Journalists took these data and crunched away, creating novel visualizations to help the public understand how TV news presented the debates.

The New York Times created a visual timeline of TV cable news coverage in the 24 hours following the presidential debate, with separate lines for CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Below the time line were telegram data short explanations of the peaks and how the different networks varied in their presentations even when they all covered roughly the same ground. The project was the work of Jasmine C. Lee, Alicia Parlapiano, Adam Pearce, and Karen Yourish. For much of the day on Sept. 29, it was featured at the top of the New York Times website.

To see more visualizations created by journalists using TV News Archive data following the first presidential debate, visit the Political TV Ad Archive.

The Internet Archive will make similar data available on the upcoming vice presidential debate, as well as the remaining presidential debates. This effort is part of a collaboration with the Annenberg Public Policy Center to study how voters learn about candidates from debates.





Posted in Announcements, News | Tagged Annenberg Public Policy Center, CNN, debates, Fox News, MSNBC, Political TV Ad Archive, presidential debates, The New York Times, TV news, TV news archive | 2 Replies
Guest Post: Preserving Digital Music – Why Netlabel Archive Matters
Posted on September 30, 2016 by Jason Scott
The following entry is by Simon Carless, who worked for the Internet Archive in the early 2000’s before moving on to work in media and conferences, while simultaneously maintaining collections at the Internet Archive and running the for-free game information site Mobygames.

netlabelsIt’s fascinating that the early Internet era (digital) data can sometimes be trickier to preserve & access than pre-Internet (analog) data. A prime example is the amazing work of the Netlabel Archive, which I wanted to both laud and highlight as ‘digital archiving done right’.

Created in 2016 by the amazing Zach Bridier, the Netlabel Archive has preserved the catalogs of 11 early ‘netlabels’ and counting, a number of which involve music that was either completely unavailable online, or difficult to listen to online. One of these netlabels is the one that I ran from 1996 to 2009, Mono/Monotonik. So obviously, I’m particularly delighted by that project. But a number of the other netlabels are also great and previously tricky to access, and I’m even more excited for those. (Reminder: all these netlabels freely distributed their music at the time, which makes it a great thing to archive and bring back.)

The nub of the problem around early netlabels – particularly from 1996 to 2003 – is due to PCs & the Internet (& pre-Internet BBSes!) just not being fast enough or having enough storage to support MP3 downloads at that time.

So this early netlabel music – on PCs and even other computers like Commodore Amigas – was composed in smaller (in kB!) module files, which was composed and played on computers by using sample data and MIDI-style ‘note triggering’ with rudimentary real-time effects. This allows 5-minute long songs to be just 30kB-300kB in size, versus the 5mB or more that a MP3 takes.

For the more recent history of netlabels, I founded the Netlabels collection at the Internet Archive back in 2003, and that’s grown to hold over 65,000 individual music releases – and hundreds of thousands of tracks – by 2016. But the Internet Archive’s collection was largely designed to hold MP3 and OGG files, and so the early .MODs, .XMs and .ITs were not always preserved as part of this collection – and they were certainly not listenable to in-browser.

Additionally, there were a number of netlabels that used their own storage instead of the Internet Archive’s, even after 2003. But if it disappeared, their data disappeared with it, and music files are generally large enough not to be archived by the saintly Wayback Machine.