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“Let a thousand Jon Stewarts bloom.” Internet Archive launches TV broadcast news search and borrow
Congratulations to the Internet Archive for launching TV News Search & Borrow service. This is truly an amazing endeavor with a growing collection of "every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news." Search results will be in 30 second clips, and if someone wants a copy of the entire program, a DVD will be sent on loan. NY Times has more. I'm sending it in to be cataloged right now!!
Today the Internet Archive launches TV News Search & Borrow. This service is designed to help engaged citizens better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections by allowing them to search closed captioning transcripts to borrow relevant television news programs. The Internet Archive works to preserve the published works of humankind. Inspired by Vanderbilt University’s Television News Archive project, the Internet Archive collects and preserves television news. Like library collections of books and newspapers, this accessible archive of TV news enables anyone to reference and compare statements from this influential medium. The collection now contains 350,000 news programs collected over 3 years from national U.S. networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C. The archive is updated with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired. Older materials are also being added.Continue reading
Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) are #OpenGov champions
The Sunlight Foundation recently named Liz Barry and her group at the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) as OpenGov Champions. Sunlight highlights these champions for their work and ingenuity in furthering govt transparency. Ms Barry and the PLOTS team is perhaps best known for using kites and helium balloons to map the BP [w:Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill] in 2010, the only high resolution images out in the media at the onset of the catastrophe. PLOTS uses "mapping and other scientific DIY methods to empower local residents and activists to issue their own data sets to better engage with their local governments in environmental and other issues in their communities." Be sure to check out their many maps available in the PLOTS open data archive. And for all of you DIY scientists, you can chip in to the PLOTS DIY spectrometry kit kickstarter campaign and help them build a spectrum-sharing wiki. Congratulations PLOTS!
ProPublica investigation shakes loose TV station public inspection files listing local political programming
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a rule that says that TV stations must keep a list of political ad buys and make it available on request by the public. However, until recently, stations weren't required to post this data on the Internet, and so the only way to get the records was to physically travel to the station in person. However, thanks to ProPublica's Free the Files project -- and especially their Free the Files volunteers!! -- this critical issue has been spotlighted and this summer the FCC passed a rule requiring the stations in the nation's top markets to upload the files to the FCC's website https://stations.fcc.gov/. The system is far from perfect and has a lot of limitations -- eg. there's not a great search! -- but it's a good start. Rachel Maddow highlighted this issue of transparency in political advertising on a recent show:
Ad Hawk: the free app for identifying who’s behind political ads
Thanks Sunlight Foundation for creating Ad Hawk, the smartphone app that identifies political ads as they air and immediately tells you about who is behind them. I'm not so inundated with ads here in CA, but I bet this will be useful for all of our readers who are in swing states.
Good news for census/maps/GIS geeks: TIGERweb set to release
This looks like a great new tool to access geographic data from the US Census Bureau. For more, check out Introduction to TIGERweb (YouTube video below).
The U.S. Census Bureau is going through the final integration tests for the next TIGERweb release. TIGERweb v2.0 (beta) will consist of a new set of map services using American Community Survey (ACS) 2011 source data, an upgraded viewer application based on comments received from our users, and a relocation of our Census 2010 viewer to TIGERweb2010. We hope to release this new version the week of September 17, 2012. Expect more information about this release later this week. If you have any questions or comments about TIGERweb, you may contact us by sending a message to geo.tigerweb@census.gov.
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