New Feature: Embedding TV News in Open Annotations

By Nate Angell | 2 November, 2017

Logos for the Internet Archive and Hypothesis.The Internet Archive and Hypothesis are announcing a new integration that enables open annotations to include embedded video from the TV News Archive, a constantly growing online, free library of TV news broadcasts that contains 1.4 million shows, some dating back to 2009, searchable by closed captioning.

Users can now embed any TV News Archive video simply by pasting a video’s URL in their annotation. Readers will then be able to play embedded videos in the Hypothesis sidebar right alongside annotated texts.

This integration makes it easy for journalists, fact-checkers, educators, scholars and anyone that wants to relate specific text in a webpage, PDF, or EPUB to a particular snippet of video news coverage. All you need to do to use it is copy the URL of a TV News Archive video page, paste it into the Hypothesis annotation editor and save your annotation. You can adjust the start and end of the video to include any exact snippet. The video will then automatically be available to view in your annotation alongside the annotated text.

See a live example of the integration in this annotation with an embedded news video of Senator Charles Schumer at a news conference over a post that checks the facts in one of his statements.

“This integration means that one of the world’s most valuable resources — the news that the Internet Archive captures across the world everyday — will be able to be brought into close context with pages and documents across the web,” said Hypothesis CEO Dan Whaley. “For instance, a video of a politician making an actual statement next to an excerpt that claims the opposite, or a video of a newsworthy event next to a deeper analysis of it.”

Launched in 2012, the TV News Archive offers a continuously expanding collection of US television news programs. The Archive contains more than 1,437,000 news programs collected over 5+ years from national U.S. networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C., updated with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired. Older materials are also being added. Available at no charge, the public can search, view, quote, borrow, and share both video and indexed text transcripts, enabling anyone to compare, contrast and quote statements from this influential medium.

Nancy Watzman, Managing Editor of the TV News Archive said “In a time when misinformation online is rampant, we need to provide new ways for people to see they can trust what they’re reading and seeing. Now that it will be possible to embed TV news clips from the TV News Archive on web pages and documents via annotation, we have a new tool to provide sourcing and explanatory material in a format that won’t disappear without warning. We’re looking forward to seeing how people use it.”

Use your own Hypothesis account to annotate webpages, PDFs, and EPUBs with embedded video from the TV News Archive.

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