Step 3: Enter Search
Visual Entities (OR) : Search by what is visually depicted onscreen. Google's Cloud Video API recognizes around 12,000 distinct objects and activities (called "entities") of which the most common thousand are available here (you can search for the complete set using the advanced search box further down on this page). You can select multiple entities and they will be boolean "OR"'d together, meaning the presence of any of them will cause that second of airtime to be returned. For more complex queries, including AND'ing entities together, use the advanced search box.
Visual Entities (OR)
Caption Entities : The station-provided human-transcribed closed captioning is analyzed by Google's Cloud Natural Language API, which abstracts from the literal words spoken to the underlying concepts and topics they reference and represent. The top 500 most common concepts are available here (you can search for the complete set using the advanced search box further down on this page). You can select multiple entities and they will be boolean "OR"'d together, meaning the presence of any of them will cause that second of airtime to be returned. For more complex queries, including AND'ing entities together, use the advanced search box. NOTE that this field searches the time-uncorrected closed captioning, meaning the returned results will often be several seconds after the actual mention of the topic (keyword search of closed captioning later in this form searches a special corrected version of the captioning in which each word is precisely aligned to the second.
Caption Entities (OR)
ASR Keywords : Google's Cloud Video API performs speech recognition on each broadcast and generates an entirely machine-produced transcript in a process known as Automated Speech Recognition (ASR). This transcript is typically more complete and more accurate than the station-provided human-produced closed captioning and includes all commercials, but may misspell some words, especially names. Use this field to keyword search this automated transcript. Words and phrases must be surrounded by quote marks including single words and phrases must be less than five words in length.
Caption Keywords : Use this field to keyword search the station-provided human-produced closed captioning. Words and phrases must be surrounded by quote marks including single words and phrases must be less than five words in length.
OCR : Google's Cloud Video API transcribes all onscreen text using OCR. Use this field to keyword search this text. Words and phrases must be surrounded by quote marks including single words and phrases must be less than five words in length.
Advanced Search : Advanced users can utilize the TVAI 2.0 API's underlying query syntax to construct complex advanced queries. Enter the raw TVAI 2.0 API query below. When using this field, all of the query fields above will be ignored.
TIME PERIOD : You can search Jan. 1, 2020 to present (with a rolling 24 hour delay) across the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC and the 24/7 programming of BBC News London, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. You can also search July 2010 to present across the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC only. Through the Media-Data Research Consortium's (M-DRC) Google Cloud COVID-19 Research Grant "Quantifying the COVID-19 Public Health Media Narrative Through TV & Radio News Analysis " you can also search the 24/7 programming of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News across a number of historical disease outbreaks (the date ranges below represent the periods of primary television news coverage analyzed - NOT the actual dates of the outbreak itself). The "Custom Date Range" option allows you to manually specify a start and end date, but note that only the periods listed in the dropdown have been analyzed, so not all date ranges include all programming. You can also select a "zoomable" volume timeline display in the next section that allows you to interactively narrow your search timeframe within one of these periods.
Time Period
Jan 2020 - Now (All Stations)
July 2010 - Present (ABC/CBS/NBC Evening News)
COVID-19 (1/1/2020 - Now)
Ecoli (5/30/2011 - 6/12/2011)
Cholera (10/22/2010 - 11/30/2010)
Ebola (7/23/2014 - 11/30/2014)
H1N1 (7/6/2009 - 1/30/2010)
Measles 2015 (1/8/2015 - 2/24/2015)
Measles 2019 (3/25/2019 - 5/15/2019)
MERS 2014 (4/29/2014 - 5/20/2014)
MERS 2015 (6/2/2015 - 6/25/2015)
Salmonella (8/18/2010 - 8/31/2010)
Zika (1/15/2016 - 10/5/2016)
Past 6 Months (All Stations)
Past Month (All Stations)
Past Week (All Stations)
Past 72 Hours (Incomplete Results)
Custom Date Range (Mixed Stations)
STATIONS : Select the stations to search (up to 10).
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
Separate Stations (Multiple Timelines)
Combine Stations (Single Timeline)
DATE RESOLUTION : By default, timespans of less than 1 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, while minute resolution is available only for one day 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
Automatic
Minute (Only For <1 Day)
Hourly (Only For <7 Days)
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Yearly
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
UTC
-12:00
-11:00
-10:00
-09:30
-09:00
-08:00
-07:00
-06:00
-05:00
-04:00
-03:30
-03:00
-02:30
-02:00
-01:00
+00:00
+01:00
+02:00
+03:00
+03:30
+04:00
+04:30
+05:00
+05:30
+05:45
+06:00
+06:30
+07:00
+08:00
+08:45
+09:00
+09:30
+10:00
+10:30
+11:00
+12:00
+12:45
+13:00
+13:45
+14:00
DAY OF WEEK : Limit to just specific days of the week (in PST timezone).
Day Of Week
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
No Smoothing (Exact Dates/Times)
Smooth 2 Steps (Light)
Smooth 3 Steps
Smooth 4 Steps
Smooth 5 Steps
Smooth 6 Steps
Smooth 7 Steps
Smooth 8 Steps
Smooth 9 Steps
Smooth 10 Steps
Smooth 11 Steps
Smooth 12 Steps
Smooth 13 Steps
Smooth 14 Steps
Smooth 15 Steps (Heavy)
Smooth 16 Steps
Smooth 17 Steps
Smooth 18 Steps
Smooth 19 Steps
Smooth 20 Steps
Smooth 21 Steps
Smooth 22 Steps
Smooth 23 Steps
Smooth 24 Steps
Smooth 25 Steps
Smooth 26 Steps
Smooth 27 Steps
Smooth 28 Steps
Smooth 29 Steps
Smooth 30 Steps (Very Heavy)
Step 4: Displays
Your AI 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 AI TV Explorer results summary.
VOLUME TIMELINE : The volume timeline is the most basic kind of visualization and shows you the total seconds of analyzed airtime 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. A static display is available, but by default a zoomable timeline is used 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). Note that monitoring outages, processing errors and other issues can influence your results and so mission-critical analyses may click on the box at the top-right of the timeline visualization to view the "Normalization Graph" to see the total number of analyzed seconds of airtime over their selected time period.
Volume Timeline
None
Include Basic
Include Zoomable
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)
None
Include Basic
Include Zoomable
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)
None
Include
STATION CHART : The station chart shows what percent of analyzed airtime on each station matched your search.
Station Chart
None
Include
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
None
Include
ASR WORDCLOUD : The top 200 most relevant seconds of airtime matching your search are selected and the top words from the machine-generated spoken word transcript displayed, allowing you to get a sense of the kinds of spoken words most associated with your search.
ASR WordCloud
None
Include
CAP WORDCLOUD : The top 200 most relevant seconds of airtime matching your search are selected and the top words from the station-provided human-produced spoken word transcript displayed, allowing you to get a sense of the kinds of spoken words most associated with your search.
Caption WordCloud
None
Include
Caption NLP WORDCLOUD : The top 200 most relevant seconds of airtime matching your search are selected and the top Google Knowledge Graph entities analyzed by Google's Cloud Natural Language API from the station-provided human-produced spoken word transcript displayed, allowing you to get a sense of the kinds of topics discussed in the spoken words most associated with your search.
Caption NLP WordCloud
None
Include
OCR WORDCLOUD : The top 200 most relevant seconds of airtime matching your search are selected and the top words from the OCR'd onscreen text displayed, allowing you to get a sense of the kinds of onscreen words most associated with your search.
OCR WordCloud
None
Include
VISUAL WORDCLOUD : The top 200 most relevant seconds of airtime matching your search are selected and the top visual "entities" (objects and activities) depicted during those seconds as identified by Google's Cloud Video API are displayed, allowing you to get a sense of the kinds of visual metaphors most associated with your search.
Visual WordCloud
None
Include
TOP MATCHING SECONDS : The top 50 most relevant seconds of airtime 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. NOTE that thumbnails are taken at the beginning of each second of airtime so you may need to view the actual video clip to see precisely within the second of airtime your search criteria appeared.
Top Matching Seconds
None
Include 50
Include 50 (Group By Show)
Include 100
Include 250
Include 500
Include 1000
Include 2500
Include 5000