benjamindhorne / archive_news_cc

Closed Caption Transcripts of News Videos from archive.org + Scripts for Downloading and Parsing the data

Closed Captions of News Videos from Archive.org

The repository provides scripts for downloading the data, and link to two datasets that were built using the scripts:

• Scripts
• Data

---

Downloading the Data from Archive.org

Download closed caption transcripts of nearly 1.3M news shows from http://archive.org.

There are three steps to downloading the transcripts:

1. We start by searching https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php with collection collection:"tvarchive". This gets us unique identifiers for each of the news shows. An identifier is a simple string that combines channel_name, show_name, time, and date. The current final list of identifiers (2009--Nov. 2017) is posted here.

2. Next, we use the identifier to build a URL where the metadata file and HTML file with the closed captions is posted. The general base URL is http://archive.org/download followed by the identifier.

3. The third script parses the downloaded metadata and HTML closed caption files and creates a CSV along with the meta data.

For instance, we will go http://archive.org/download/CSPAN_20090604_230000 for identifier CSPAN_20090604_230000 And from http://archive.org/download/CSPAN_20090604_230000/CSPAN_20090604_230000_meta.xml, we read the link http://archive.org/details/CSPAN_20090604_230000, from which we get the text from HTML file. We also store the meta data from the META XML file.

Scripts

1. Get Show Identifiers

   • Get Identifiers For Each Show (Channel, Show, Date, Time)
   • Produces data/search.csv

2. Download Metadata and HTML Files

   • Download the Metadata and HTML Files
   • Saves the metadata and HTML files to two separate folders specified in --meta and --html respectively. The default folder names are meta and html respectively.

3. Parse Metadata and HTML Files

   • Parses metadata and HTML Files and Saves to a CSV
   • Produces a CSV. Here's an example

Running the Scripts

1. Get all TV Archive identifiers from archive.org.

   python get_news_identifiers.py -o ../data/search.csv
   

2. Download metadata and HTML files for all the shows in the sample input file

   python scrape_archive_org.py ../data/search-test.csv
   

   This will create two directories meta and html by default in the same folder as where the script is. We have included the first 25 metadata and first 25 html files.

   You can change the folder for meta by using the --meta flag. To change the directory for html, use the --html flag and specify the new directory. For instance,

   python scrape_archive_org.py --meta meta-foxnews --html html-foxnews ../data/search-test.csv
   

   Use -c/--compress option to store and parse the downloaded files in compression format (GZip).

3. Parse and extract meta fields and text from sample metadata and HTML files.

   python parse_archive.py ../data/search-test.csv
   

   A sample output file.

Data

The data are hosted on Google Cloud Storage. It is setup such that the requestor pays. To learn more about how to download the files from Google Storage, click here.

There are two separate datasets, one with ~ 500k and another with about 860k news transcripts.

500k Dataset from 2014

• CSV (~ 2.6 GB)
• HTML (~ 10.4 GB)

860k Dataset from 2017

• CSV (~ 10.6 GB)
• HTML (~ 20.2 GB)
• Meta (~ 2.6 GB)

License

We are releasing the scripts under the MIT License.