The C-SPAN Archives

An Interdisciplinary Resource for Discovery, Learning, and Engagement

Robert X. Browning, Robert X. Browning

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612493541
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Social Science

The C-SPAN Archives records, indexes, and preserves all C-SPAN programming for historical, educational, and research uses. Every C-SPAN program aired since 1987, from all House and Senate sessions in the US Congress, to hearings, presidential speeches, conventions, and campaign events, totaling over 200, 000 hours, is contained in the video library and is immediately and freely accessible through the database and electronic archival systems developed and maintained by staff. Whereas C-SPAN is best known as a resource for political processes and policy information, the Archives also offers rich educational research and teaching opportunities. This book provides guidance and inspiration to scholars who may be interested in using the Archives to illuminate concepts and processes in varied communication and political science subfields using a range of methodologies for discovery, learning, and engagement. Applications described range from teaching rhetoric to enhancing TV audience's viewing experience. The book links to illustrative clips from the Archives to help readers appreciate the usability and richness of the source material and the pedagogical possibilities it offers. Many of the essays are authored by faculty connected with the Purdue University School of Communication, named after the founder of C-SPAN Brian Lamb.The book is divided into four parts: Part 1 consists of an overview of the C-SPAN Archives, the technology involved in establishing and updating its online presence, and the C-SPAN copyright and use policy. Featured are the ways in which the collection is indexed and tips on how individuals can find particular materials. This section provides an essential foundation for scholars' and practitioners' increased use of this valuable resource. Parts 2 and 3 contain case studies describing how scholars use the Archives in their research, teaching, and engagement activities. Some case studies were first presented during a preconference at the National Communication Association (NCA) convention in November 2013, while others have been invited or solicited through open calls. Part 4 explores future directions for C-SPAN Archive use as a window into American life and global politics.

PART I

OVERVIEW OF C-SPAN AND THE C-SPAN ARCHIVES

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO C-SPAN, ITS MISSION, AND ITS ACADEMIC COMMITMENT

Susan Swain, President and Co-CEO, C-SPAN

In November 2013, faculty from the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University organized a session in Washington, DC, attached to the annual gathering of the National Communication Association. Their goal was to demonstrate to members of the academy the richness of the C-SPAN Video Library (http://www.c-span.org) for both academic research and teaching. This book is a result of that daylong session.

This project is a long time coming. Academic use of the C-SPAN video collection has always been a goal of the network and, in particular, of the collection’s founding director, Dr. Robert Browning. The archival systems he and his team created for the C-SPAN Video Library were initially developed with an eye toward academic research, and while the C-SPAN viewing audience has embraced the use of the online Video Library, academic use has much greater potential. We hope this project creates a foundation for it to grow.

A bit of background about C-SPAN and its Video Library may be useful. C-SPAN first went on satellite in March 1979, created as a public service by the nation’s cable television companies and organized as a not-for-profit company to distribute noncommercial public affairs programming to our affiliates. Although our mission is to televise the workings of the federal government, it’s important to note that C-SPAN is a private company that neither seeks nor receives public funding. We began by televising the floor debates of the U.S. House of Representatives, live and without commentary, allowing the American public to see for themselves the workings of Congress. As amazing as it seems in today’s world where video is ubiquitous, the 1977 debate over allowing television access to the halls of Congress was hard fought; both its proponents and detractors understood that the idea was revolutionary. Soon after its launch, C-SPAN began to add additional content, such as live interview/call-in programs and coverage of congressional hearings. By 1986, the U.S. Senate found itself relegated to the sidelines of news coverage and decided to allow television cameras to cover its debates, as well. C-SPAN2 was launched in June of that year to carry the Senate live.

The year 1986 was notable for another reason: a discussion took place between the College of Liberal Arts faculty at Purdue University and C-SPAN founder and Purdue alumnus, Brian Lamb, which led to the creation of the C-SPAN Video Archives. Mr. Lamb lamented that C-SPAN was regularly forced to erase historic political video because no system existed for capturing and archiving it. Dr. Browning, then an assistant professor of political science, raised his hand and volunteered to develop such a system. With the backing of his dean, Dr. David Caputo, Dr. Browning launched the C-SPAN Archives in September 1987 and has accomplished the herculean task of capturing every event televised by C-SPAN in the ensuing 27 years.

In 1998, an agreement between Purdue and C-SPAN brought the Archives under C-SPAN’s control and the organization moved off campus to its current home in the Purdue Research Park in West Lafayette, Indiana. The long relationship between Purdue University and C-SPAN remains vibrant, highlighted by the naming of the Brian Lamb School of Communication in 2011.

The C-SPAN Archives currently contains more than 200,000 hours of video content. In this vast collection are the public events of five presidents, complete video records of the floor debates of each Congress from the 101st onward, candidate events from seven presidential campaigns, and hundreds of hours of public and official reaction to major historical events. A quick tap of our collective memories illustrates the richness of the materials: the Iran-Contra Investigation; the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas nominations; the Persian Gulf War; NAFTA; the end of the Cold War; the Oklahoma City bombing; the Clinton impeachment trial; the Columbine and Sandy Hook school shootings; the 2000 recount; 9/11; Enron; the Columbia explosion; the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars; Hurricane Katrina; the Abramoff lobbying scandal; the 2008 financial crisis; the Arab Spring; the same-sex marriage debate; the passage of the Affordable Care Act; and federal budget standoffs too numerous to list. In short, at one’s fingertips is a cache of nearly 30 years of U.S. political history in original source format—long-form coverage of events without commentary. The threads of potential research available to any interested political scientist seem almost overwhelming.

And, as time passes, historians will also find that they can come to the Video Library to find oral histories, the reminiscences of political leaders, and firsthand accounts of the events of the past 30 years.

Researchers and teachers in the communication fields will find much to harvest as well. Because the policy debate is fueled by political rhetoric, the C-SPAN Archives is a treasure trove for the study of social and political argument. Students of advertising and public relations will find public campaigns on major policy issues and several decades’ worth of political advertisements. Health communication researchers can examine the public debate over issues as impactful as stem cell research and as current as toy safety during the holidays. Not surprisingly, there are literally hundreds of hours of video available on key health policy topics such as HIV/AIDS research, research funding for cancer, and abortion.

Also part of the Archives’ collection is the content produced by C-SPAN’s BookTV unit, which offers 48 hours of programming about nonfiction books each week. Nearly every significant nonfiction author of the past 15 years has been captured by its cameras. Likewise, the primary source video produced by C-SPAN’s most recent programming venture, American History TV, has been captured and organized by the C-SPAN Archives.

Amassing this collection since 1987 has been both a technological challenge and a labor of love for Dr. Browning and his staff. As video technology changed from half-inch tapes collected by VCRs to digital files swept in by servers, the Archives had to change, too, and then update all the materials that came before. The two most profound decisions in the history of the Archives were its initial founding in 1987 and the 2005 decision by C-SPAN’s board of directors to fund the complete digitization of the network’s video collection and make it fully available to the public.

This latter decision was a significant contribution to the public good on the part of the cable television industry, which created and funds C-SPAN operations. Today, in ways that were not possible for much of the Archives’ prior history, one can easily access and use the C-SPAN Video Library from a desktop computer or mobile device. Closed captioning–based transcripts make keyword searches possible; online tools make clipping and sharing video as simple as a few clicks on the keyboard.

Using the Archives’ digitized collection and the online Video Library’s search tools, the contributors to this book hope to demonstrate the application of C-SPAN video to specific research studies and to coursework. All of us involved in this project hope to further spread the word about the rich content available in the Video Library and to stimulate interest in C-SPAN–based teaching and research.

Thank you for your interest in this first-of-its kind effort, to the National Communication Association for its support, and to the Lamb School faculty organizers of this project, particularly Dr. Patrice Buzzanell, Dr. Glenn Sparks, Dr. Howard Sypher, and Dr. Robert Browning, the editor of this volume.

As the old saying goes, may what you read on these pages allow a thousand flowers to bloom.

CHAPTER 2

INTRODUCTION TO THE C-SPAN VIDEO LIBRARY

Robert X. Browning, Purdue University and C-SPAN Archives

There was an early recognition that C-SPAN programming is important content to be preserved. As Susan Swain indicates in Chapter 1, “Introduction to C-SPAN, Its Mission, and Its Academic Commitment,” the topic came up early in a discussion with Purdue University faculty in 1986. By that time, C-SPAN was seven years old, was programming two networks, and was aware that what it was creating through its daily, unedited coverage of Washington, DC, public affairs events was a valuable, historical recognition of the nation’s history.

C-SPAN programming includes the entirety of House and Senate legislative sessions, congressional hearings, news conferences, presidential speeches and other appearances, party conventions and campaign events, many public policy forums, and daily call-ins with elected officials, policy leaders, and journalists. Because of the unedited nature of C-SPAN’s programming, as well as its balanced selection of events and production values that do not detract from or try to influence these events, the coverage that C-SPAN creates serves as much more than the first draft of history. It is the video record of the nation’s policymaking and discussion of that policy.

The archive that we envisioned was to be an indexed video collection of primary event coverage. Initially, it was a collection of videotapes with a computerized index to those videos. That initial vision and the basic architecture allowed the collection to develop into the C-SPAN Video Library (http://www.c-span.org), a digitally indexed and accessible collection of more than 200,000 first-run C-SPAN hours aired since 1987.

The technology that was used in the early days was not complex. Twelve VHS recorders captured each network 24 hours a day, 7 days per week on 2-hour videotapes. Today, the technology is much more complex, but it uses the same principles that guided the earliest architecture. Digital encoders create 1-hour files that are stored on servers, then processed into different viewing formats, moved onto the storage RAIDs (redundant arrays of independent drives), copied to Amazon Web Services in the cloud for redundancy, and backed up in the original high format on the digital tapes. An additional recording stream creates 5-minute files so that the video can be almost instantaneously available. Many archives have a lag time before materials are available; we keep that lag down to about 10 minutes after an event begins.

While we moved from analog tapes to digital files in 2002, one thing that has remained constant in both the analog and digital eras has been the use of a core database to manage all the information about the video recording. From the first days, we began organizing the information into fields and entering these data first into a single computer and later into a networked database that allowed different people to enter data at the same time. This decision created a retrieval system that could be used to quickly find and duplicate the videotapes and answer questions about what videos we had in response to telephone inquiries.

It is easy to see how this indexed system became the basis for C-SPAN Video Library in 2010—a move that won the C-SPAN Archives a George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in digital journalism. The relationship between the video and the database records was a critical organizational decision that allowed the Archives to retrieve and digitize the 120,000 hours of analog content—once C-SPAN’s board of directors made the decision to build the Video Library of all available C-SPAN content. When that content was digitized and available online, 10,000 hours of original tapes that predated the archival recording were also made available.

All of this content is easily accessible online through the C-SPAN Video Library. Programs are indexed by the date that they occurred as well as when they aired. The latter helps with creating a schedule and retrieving programs, but it is the event date that is the important historical date. The following are identified for each program: a title, category, and format; the organization that sponsored the event (hosting organization); a brief description of what occurred; the name, title, and affiliation of all who appear. Those affiliations are also used to designate with the hosting organization so that one can differentiate between an organization that sponsors an event and the people from that organization who appear in that event. A set of nested keywords is also attached to each program.

A typical record looks like this:

Format: Speech

Title: Unemployment Insurance Extension

Organizer: White House

Event Date: January 7, 2014

Summary: President Obama urged Congress to pass a bill to extend emergency unemployment benefits. His remarks came after the Senate voted to advance the bill.

Person-Title-Affiliation: Barack Obama, President, U.S.

Tags: Business and Commerce—Employment Policy—Unemployment

Advanced an unemployment benefits extension bill that would extend insurance for eligible workers for 3 months.

Since 1992, C-SPAN has been capturing digital closed captioning text that is time stamped with the time that it was recorded. These captions enable text-based searching to find video clips. Closed captioning for U.S. House and Senate sessions has existed the longest and is the most developed. Because the House and Senate caption their own sessions and identify each speaker, we are able to match these speaker names with our database, create a chronological index of all congressional speakers, and link these appearances to the text of their remarks. Furthermore, we are able to link the closed captioned text to the Congressional Record, the official record of their remarks. Since members are allowed to change their remarks and to insert remarks into the record that were never made, the C-SPAN recording becomes an invaluable research tool and the real record of what transpires on the House and Senate floors. (See Figure 2.1.)

Figure 2.1 An example of the searchable closed captioning record for a House session. (© 2014 by C-SPAN.)

Using computer records of C-SPAN’s productions, we are able to create the same time-based index of most C-SPAN programs, including congressional hearings. These records allow the creation of within-program speaker indexes that allow users to search by speaker or by words within individual programs. A typical index is shown in Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2 The searchable closed captioning record for a congressional hearing. (© 2014 by C-SPAN.)

The indexing system allows searching across programs by any of the indexed terms, including the closed caption text. For presidential events the official transcript is attached and time indexed. So for all presidential events, an actual transcript can be searched to find the video reference. (See Figure 2.3.)

Figure 2.3 The transcript record of a portion of a presidential speech. (© 2014 by C-SPAN.)

The Video Library permits clipping and sharing of video. These clips make it easy for users to select just a portion of a longer video to illustrate a comment or statement that they want to emphasize by simply moving the begin and end point selectors to select the portion of the video they want to clip. These clips remain on the C-SPAN servers, and all have a permanent link so that they can be used repeatedly. The links can be shared, and many videos can be embedded in blogs or Web pages. By creating a MyC-SPAN account, users can keep a directory of all of their clips and return to their personal account to retrieve or share these clips. Creating and sharing video clips is an effective use of the Video Library.

All of this indexing and text linking, as well as its software systems, make the C-SPAN Video Library an unparalleled resource for communication, political science, historical, and sociological research. In this volume, 12 scholars present applications from teaching, research, and engagement that utilize the Video Library. It is hoped that these scholars inspire others to extend their applications in new and enhanced ways. This volume is simply a first step—a guide to the possible, to the “what ifs” of teaching, research, and engagement.

This volume contains four examples of how C-SPAN can be used in teaching and six examples of C-SPAN use in communication research. Each of the contributors is an insightful innovator. All are leaders in their fields who are either exploring ways to use primary source video to introduce students to process and concepts or introducing new research horizons that they examine through data collected from video. This volume contains other essays as well—those that explore community outreach, insights ...