Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “I have no relationship with Putin…I don’t think I’ve ever met him.” Stephanopoulos pressed him on this point during the interview, saying that Trump had previously claimed a relationship with him. PolitiFact ruled this statement by Trump as a “full flip flop”: “Trump’s denial of a relationship with Putin contradicted what he had said on multiple previous occasions.”
By providing a free and enduring source for TV news broadcasts of telegram data Trump’s statements, the Internet Archive hopes to make it more efficient for the media, researchers, and the public to track Trump’s statements while fact-checking and reporting on the new administration. The Trump Archive can also serve as a rich treasure trove of video material for any creative use: comedy, art, documentaries, wherever people’s inspiration takes them.
We consider the Trump Archive to be an experimental model for creating similar archives for other public officials. For example, we’ll explore the idea of creating curated collections for Trump’s nominees to head federal agencies; members of Congress of both parties (for example, perhaps the Senate and House majority and minority leadership); Supreme Court nominees, and so on.
we hope to collaborate with researchers to apply machine intelligence to expand this collection, building others and making search of our entire TV library vastly more efficient.
Such experimentation builds on our experience with first prototyping and then developing the the Political TV Ad Archive. Our first collection of political TV ads, covering ads aired in Philadelphia during the 2014 mid-term elections, was built largely by hand. However, in preparation for the Political TV Ad Archive, we created a new open source tool, the Duplitron, that was able to identify ad airings by deploying audio fingerprinting. During the course of the project, we collected nearly 3,000 ads and documented more than 364,000 ad airings.
Why now?
Just because something is broadcast or posted on the internet doesn’t mean it’s forever. Reporters and the public may take it for granted that a news story or a piece of broadcast video is only a google search away, but as newspapers, companies, and organizations fail and change, often vital information is lost. The web is far more fragile than is generally understood.
The Internet Archive’s core mission is to preserve and make accessible our cultural heritage. For example, the Wayback Machine preserves websites over time, so if pages or sites are deleted, they can still be found. For example, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reported on how the president-elect had deleted a web page from the official transition website that had touted Trump properties.
We also preserve political and news content through the TV News Archive, which contains news broadcasts by major networks back to 2009, searchable via closed captioning. The Political TV Ad Archive archives 2016 election ads along with relevant fact checks and follow-the-money reporting by our journalism partners. Our Political Campaign web archive is preserving election-related online media, such as select candidate and political groups’ websites and Twitter and Instagram feeds.
What’s next
The Trump Archive is a work in progress; we will continue to refine the content. We hope to work with others to broaden the materials available, to make search more efficient, and otherwise make it more useful for the public. We’d like you feedback and suggestions.