Ten years of U.S. TV News — Since 2009, the Internet Archive has been actively curating a collection of news broadcasts from across the country, assembling a corpus of over 200,000 hours of video. Computer Scientists Will Crichton and Haotian Zhang will perform an in-depth longitudinal study of this video collection, scanning for patterns in both audio as well as visual trends. How has coverage of different topics changed over the years? How often do women get cut off in conversation versus men? What is the relationship between still images and subject? How does clothing and fashion differ across networks and shows? This project will tackle these and many other difficult questions, demonstrating the new potential for large-scale video analysis. This Magic Grant will build on a previous grant from Brown, also led by Will Crichton, called Esper. That project created an open-source software infrastructure that helped journalists and researchers “scale up” their investigations, to analyze, visualize and query extremely large video collections.
