notes.husk.org/likes images.

futurejournalismproject:

Mapping 400,000 Hours of US TV News

Via the Internet Archive:

We are excited to unveil a couple experimental data-driven visualizations that literally map 400,000 hours of U.S. television news. One of our collaborating scholars, Kalev Leetaru, applied “fulltext geocoding” software to our entire television news research service collection. These algorithms scan the closed captioning of each broadcast looking for any mention of a location anywhere in the world, disambiguate them using the surrounding discussion (Springfield, Illinois vs Springfield, Massachusetts), and ultimately map each location. The resulting CartoDB visualizations provide what we believe is one of the first large-scale glimpses of the geography of American television news, beginning to reveal which areas receive outsized attention and which are neglected….

…What you see here represents our very first experiment with revealing the geography of television news and required bringing together a bunch of cutting-edge technologies that are still very much active areas of research. While there is still lots of work to be done, we think this represents a tremendously exciting prototype for new ways of interacting with the world’s information by organizing it geographically and putting it on a map where it belongs!

There are two ways to explore the visualization: one is to watch news mentions of different places in the world each day, the other is to select a TV station and time window and see what it reported on.

Related: This former librarian single-handedly taped 35 years of TV news. This one’s well worth the read. Marion Stokes recorded Philadelphia news stations from 1977 - 2012, and a batch of the 140,000 VHS tapes she produced is being digitized by The Internet Archive.

Image: Screenshot, TV News Archive, via the Internet Archive. Select to embiggen.