GDELT Summary: Chyron Explorer

Chyron Explorer

This service allows you to rapidly create a visual dashboard that summarizes broadcast television news chyrons matching your search using data from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive's "Third Eye" OCR stream. Using the options below you will select the dataset to search, the kind of dashboard you want, the specific displays to include in your dashboard and the search to run.

Step 1: Dataset

GDELT Summary supports searching either global online news coverage monitored by GDELT and its global partners or broadcast television news coverage monitored by the Internet Archive. You can use the dropdown below to switch to global online news coverage.

Dataset

Step 2: Output Type

Right now, GDELT Summary only supports a single output type: a basic visual dashboard that summarizes coverage matching your search.

Output Type

Step 3: Enter Search

Enter your search keywords below. You are searching the reprocessed OCR of onscreen chyron text monitored by the Internet Archive's Television Archive's "Third Eye" OCR stream. The raw per-second OCR is processed by language models and edit distance clustering and grouped by minute to find the "best" available version of each chyron to absolutely minimize OCR error as best as possible, but keep in mind that there will still be substantial OCR error in these results and some stations may have temporary outages.

All words/phrases should be in the language of the station(s) you are searching. This means you must conduct separate searches if you wish to search across stations in different languages. Phrases should be enclosed in quote marks and are limited to a maximum of five words. If you include multiple words/phrases all of them will be required to appear somewhere in the 15 second clip for it to match. Only the exact keyword(s) entered are searched (searching for "russia" does NOT match "russian" or "russians"). You can perform limited boolean "OR" searches by enclosing a group of OR'd terms inside a set of parantheses - for example, to search for "syria" appearing near a set of russian-related terms you might search for "syria (russia OR russians OR russian OR kremlin OR putin)". You can also put a "-" in front of a given word or phrase to exclude articles that contain it.

Keyword(s)

TIME PERIOD: By default June 2009 to present is searched. You can narrow the timeframe to a shorter window to examine a particular time period. (You can also select a "zoomable" volume timeline display in the next section that allows you to interactively narrow your search timeframe.)

Time Period

Start Date

End Date

STATIONS: Select the stations/networks/markets to search.

Stations

COMBINE/SEP: By default each station's results are reported separately in the resulting displays. You can combine the output of all of the stations into a single result to make it easier to examine the aggregate coverage of a set of networks, especially for comparison purposes.

Combine/Separate

DATE RESOLUTION: By default, timespans of less than a day will be displayed at minute resolution, less than 7 days will be displayed at hourly resolution, those under 3 years will be shown at daily resolution and spans longer than 3 years will be shown at monthly resolution. Hourly resolution is only available for periods of 7 days or less and will generate an error for longer timespans. Otherwise, you can manually select the desired date resolution below. This is especially helpful for rare search terms or those with high burstiness, as trends are often more visible at weekly, monthly and yearly aggregation levels. Note that the start and end date/times of your query are automatically adjusted for each resolution. This means that if you select Weekly resolution below, your start and stop dates are adjusted forward/backward as needed to encompass complete weeks.

Date Resolution

TIMEZONE: By default, all dates/times are expressed in UTC. Sometimes it is necessary to convert to a specific timezone to localize results, especially for precision analysis of sudden onset breaking news events or when aligning news coverage with external timelines of the events they describe. Note that changing the timezone below will change both how the start/stop date/times above are interpreted and how all results are returned.

Timezone

SMOOTHING: By default, timeline visualizations will report exact values, but this can lead to a noisy graph that makes macro-level patterns more difficult to discern. To address this, you can enable smoothing that computes a moving window average to smooth the results and make patterns more apparent. Remember that moving window averages slide trends to the right and under heavy smoothing peaks can appear days to weeks later on the timeline.

Smoothing

Step 4: Displays

Your Chyron Explorer dashboard is built up by appending together a series of displays and content sections. Use the dropdowns below to select which you'd like to include in your Chyron Explorer results summary.

VOLUME TIMELINE: The volume timeline is the most basic kind of visualization and shows you the total seconds of airtime on each selected station monitored by the Internet Archive over the selected time period that featured a chyron containing your search terms. It offers a quick visual gauge of how much chyron attention your search is receiving on each selected station. By default the timeline offers a static display, but you can optionally include a zoomable timeline that allows the user to interactively zoom into a particular period of time to see only coverage from that period (such as to drill in to a particular day where coverage of the topic peaked).

Volume Timeline

STATION CHART: The station chart shows the total seconds of chyron airtime monitored from each station by the Internet Archive that matched your search. This allows you to directly compare how much attention each station is paying to a given topic.

Station Chart

TOP WORDS WORDCLOUD: The top 200 most relevant chyrons matching your search are selected and the top 200 most common non-stopwords are displayed, allowing you to get a sense of the kinds of words most commonly associated with your search.

Top Words WordCloud

TOP MATCHING CLIPS: The top 50 most relevant chyrons matching your search are displayed. You can click on any clip to jump to the Internet Archive's website to view the actual video of the clip.

Top Matching Clips