GDELT Summary: Television Explorer

Television Explorer

This service allows you to rapidly create a visual dashboard that summarizes broadcast television news coverage of your search using data from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive, powered by the TV 2.0 API. 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

GDELT Summary supports either a basic visual dashboard that summarizes coverage matching your search, or a comparison visualization that compares up to four searches to make it easier to examine differences in how various topics are being covered in the media.

Output Type

Step 3: Enter Search

Enter your search keywords below. You are searching the complete raw closed captioning stream of all news programming monitored by the Internet Archive's Television Archive. Closed captioning is searched as-is as provided by each station, meaning will always be some small amount of captioning error. The Archive has monitored more than 150 stations since 2009, but has not monitored all stations for the full time period. You should carefully check the start/stop monitoring dates for your stations of interest to ensure they were monitored during the full time period of interest. Advanced users with specific needs to precisely identify any monitoring disruptions should look for the normalization baseline link on the results page above the volume timeline display or can also download the inventory files for the given days. Only programming determined by the Internet Archive to be primarily "news" in nature is monitored - all other shows, such as purely comedy or entertainment programming are excluded.

Previous versions of the Television Explorer divided broadcasts into discrete sentences and reported the number of matching sentences, but the use of sentences was difficult for many users to conceptualize and integrate with other time-based measures. Thus, the new Television Explorer now uses airtime. Each broadcast is divided into a series of sequential 15 second clips and we display the percent of 15 second clips that matched your search. Thus, a 30 minute broadcast will be divided into 120 separate 15 second clips. Note that most commercials are not closed captioned and thus are excluded from searches and so most stations will have less than 5,760 clips per day. Searches for phrases that span the boundary between two clips are counted for the first clip, ensuring there is no double counting.

All words/phrases should be in the language of the station(s) you are searching (for example, to search Univision stations you should provide Spanish keywords/phrases). 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.

You can also specify one or more keywords/phrases that must appear near your main keywords/phrases, but at a greater distance than an ordinary keyword. For example, you might want to see how often "emails" appeared near "clinton" on each station. If you search for "clinton email" you will get all clips that mention both terms in the same 15 second clip. This will miss cases where "clinton" appeared in one clip and "emails" appeared in the following clip. To allow for these kinds of "context" searches, you can add context:"yourkeyword" to search for a given keyword either in the same clip as your main keyword(s) or in the 15 second clips immediately before and after the matching clip. Thus, a search for clinton (context:"email" OR context:"emails" OR context:"server") would return all clips that contained "clinton" and which also contained either "email", "emails", or "server" either in the same clip or the immediately preceeding or following clip.

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 (up to 10). Note that when selecting multiple markets you may exceed the maximum station limit when you view your results due to the number of individual stations in each market.

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

NORM/RAW: By default, timeline and barchart results are reported as a percent of the total airtime monitored from each station (the number of matching 15 second blocks divided by the total number of monitored 15 second blocks), rather than as a raw count of 15 second blocks. This is because different stations may have different amounts of news programming (strictly entertainment shows are not monitored) and advertising (some stations may have no advertisements while others may devote a substantial amount of airtime to ads), while for some stations the Internet Archive only monitors selections of their programming. There can also be sporadic technical glitches that might cause a brief outage in monitoring. Using normalized counts ensures that the results you see are less impacted by these issues, but for some specific situations you may need to view the raw number of matching 15s blocks. Note that when using raw counts you might want to click on the "Export" button at the top right of the timeline graph and choose "View Normalization Graph" to ensure there were no outages or other issues in the stations in question during the time period of interest.

Normalized/Raw

DATE RESOLUTION: By default, timespans of 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 Television 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 TV Explorer results summary.

VOLUME TIMELINE: The volume timeline is the most basic kind of visualization and shows you the percent of all news programming airtime on each selected station monitored by the Internet Archive over the selected time period that matched your search. It offers a quick visual gauge of how much news 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

STREAMCHART VOLUME TIMELINE: This shows the same information as the standard volume timeline, but displays it as a streamgraph, which can make certain kinds of trends more visible.

Volume Timeline (Streamgraph)

HEATMAP VOLUME TIMELINE: This shows the same information as the standard volume timeline, but breaks it down by hour. This display shows an hourly timeline of total airtime seconds matching the query, rapidly pinpointing hourly trends, where the X axis is days and Y axis is hours from 0 to 23. Each cell is color-coded from white (0) to dark blue (maximum value). Note that this visualization is very computationally expensive and thus may take several seconds or longer to return.

Volume Timeline (Heatmap)

ONLINE NEWS VOLUME TIMELINE: This display is functionally identical to the one above, but displays the percent of all English language online news coverage monitored by GDELT that matched your query, allowing you to instantly compare topics that received more or less attention on television versus online news. This display is only available for timespans that do not stretch earlier than January 1, 2017.

Online News Volume Timeline

GOOGLE TRENDS TIMELINE: Embeds a Google Trends timeline showing you changes in search interest over time. This allows you to compare trends in media coverage of a topic against search interest in that topic. Note that Google Trends only supports basic keyword and phrase searches, so this display will generate an error for more complex queries, including ones using OR operators.

Google Trends Timeline

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

Station Chart

SHOW CHART: The show chart estimates the top 10 shows covering your search, allowing you to understand whether specific shows are driving coverage.

Show Chart

TOP WORDS WORDCLOUD: The top 200 most relevant clips matching your search are selected, along with the 15 second windows before and after them 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 clips 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