A Vast Wonderland

I’ve written about the Internet Archive a few times on this blog; it’s the best thing I’ve discovered in my recent exploration of digital historical resources. I’ve mostly used its Wayback Machine to look at some of the billions of pages of the internet it has saved, but it also preserves books, films, music and a lot more.

Included in “more” is the Television News Archive. This archive allows users to search closed captioning of news broadcasts, streaming the results in 30 second clips. Originally created in September 2012 to track television news coverage of the Presidential Election from two local stations (one in San Francisco, one in D.C.), the project has continued past its original scope. Recent topics include Jason Collins, Victor Yanukovych, and Whatsapp, and the original networks have now expanded to include Comedy Central, BBC America and Univision (though only news programs of those networks are covered.) The TNA has archived over 542,000 news broadcasts.

Like many efforts of the Internet Archive, the TNA theoretically is in a gray area of copyright law. Like the webpages the Wayback Machine preserves, the broadcasts in the TNA are not copyrighted by the Internet Archive. However, it is clear that the TNA’s use of these copyrighted broadcasts is fair use.

First, let’s assess the TNA according to the four factors of fair use:

1. Purpose of Use: TNA’s original purpose was “to help engaged citizens better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections.” Though that purpose has expanded past elections, the central tenet of furthering American civic engagement and education still exists.
2. Nature of Copyrighted Work: The original material, though copyrighted itself, is heavily reliant on Fair Use since the images used are not owned by the broadcast. (For example, in the Jason Collins mentions linked above, the clip of Collins entering the game is not copyrighted by the local news stations.) The original material is (mostly) educational.
3. Extent of use: With only 30 second clips of the news segments available, the archive only shows a very limited extent of the copyrighted material.
4. Financial implications: There is no direct economic benefit for the Television News Archive (or IA in general) since it is a free service. Meanwhile, past news broadcasts are not “sold” to the public like say old episodes of sitcoms are.

However, the courts currently place less emphasis on the four factors than on the “transformativeness” of the Fair Use claim. On this account, the TNA passes as well. By allowing the public to compare broadcasts from around the country side-by-side, the TNA adds an extra layer of meaning to these copyrighted informational programs.  If you don’t believe me, then listed to former FCC Chairman Newton Minow — who called television a vast wasteland in 1961. On the archive’s statements of support page, he says “The Internet Archive’s TV news research service builds upon broadcasters’ public interest obligations. This new service offers citizens exceptional opportunities to assess political campaigns and issues, and to hold powerful public institutions accountable.” As my emphasis shows, Minow’s support directly explains the transformativeness of the TNA.

Just another reason the Internet Archive is so critical.

Spiraling out of Control

Do you remember your first tweet?

Some of you in History and New Media probably do, if you only started tweeting a few weeks ago. However, for those of us who started earlier, it’s tougher. I remember when I started tweeting from my @sportzak account (March 2009) just not what I tweeted. Did I write something witty? Something historical? Something insightful? Something bland like ‘hey this is my first tweet’?

Since I’ve been reading about internet archiving this week, I thought it would be fun to find out if my first tweet is archived.

First I tried the Way Back Machine. But no dice. As Jinfang Niu points out in her overview of web archiving not all websites can be crawled, either due to the crawler limitations (dynamic web content, like streaming media, can’t be archived easily) or the sites themselves block such actions via robot exclusions. Twitter, with log-ins, passwords and privacy concerns, is not cached. (Plus everyone’s “twitter.com” page looks completely different since it shows their customized feed, so I don’t even know how it’d be possible to archive the main site.)

Fortunately, it turns out that Twitter has been archiving my tweets this whole time! I found a link showing directions on how to download your twitter archive, and after I downloaded and extracted the zip file, I finally saw my initial tweet:

Wow this thing spirals pretty quickly.

— Zach Klitzman (@sportzak) March 4, 2009

I think this is a perfect first tweet, as it really sums up the internet as a whole, not just twitter. As Abbie Grotke opens her review of the Library of Congress’ web archiving endeavors, the internet “is large and ever-changing and that content is added and removed continually” causing issues with selection, timing, and value when archiving sites. (Think of Niu’s example of archiving p1 and p2-a of a website.) Of course, Internet spiraling can be good: the September 11th digital archive “spiraled” from 28 submissions by January 2002, to 328 by March, 693 by May, 948 by July, and 1,624 by August thanks to the interconnectivity of the internet.

What were your first Tweets like? Post them below in the comments!

In honor of my first tweet, let’s end this post with some John Coltrane: