Mapping 400,000 Hours of U.S. TV News by Roger Macdonald.
From the post:
We are excited to unveil a couple experimental data-driven visualizations that literally map 400,000 hours of U.S. television news. One of our collaborating scholars, Kalev Leetaru, applied “fulltext geocoding” software to our entire television news research service collection. These algorithms scan the closed captioning of each broadcast looking for any mention of a location anywhere in the world, disambiguate them using the surrounding discussion (Springfield, Illinois vs Springfield, Massachusetts), and ultimately map each location. The resulting CartoDB visualizations provide what we believe is one of the first large-scale glimpses of the geography of American television news, beginning to reveal which areas receive outsized attention and which are neglected.
Stunning even for someone who thinks U.S. television news is self-obsessive.
In the rough early stages, but you need to see this.
Not that I expect it to change the coverage of U.S. television news, any more than campaign finance disclosure has made elected officials any the less promiscuous.
I first saw this in a tweet by Hilary Mason.