Following the liberalization of their copyright policy earlier this year C-SPAN is now publishing a new index of its House and Senate floor proceedings — The C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle. According to them the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as the Record is available. It only includes members who appeared on the floor to deliver or insert their remarks. The text included is what the member submitted. Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual statements. This is great progress!
update see also the sunlight post, and notice the link back in list-by-day descriptions here on metavid
Each close caption segment is a few sentences. When doing searches keep in mind that a sentence may break mid stream so exact phrase match may be missed in broken sentences. The metavid search process currently uses mysql FULLTEXT SEARCH in boolean mode. This means that you have a few parameters that you can control in doing search queries. For example if you search for “iraq war” that will match the exact phrase, or if you search for +iraq -war that will find only instances where iraq is mentioned and war is not mentioned. You can see the full documentation on boolean full text searches in mysqls documentation.
I have also updated the search page and front page to highlight popular queries that people have been making.
update: you can now also jump to any available day on the search page.
Metavid Wiki - Real Time Collaborative Semantic Audio/Video Metadata in MediaWiki. Metavid Wiki is the in development second iteration of the Metavid archive project (metavid.org). Metavid Wiki builds off of the MediaWiki code base, the semantic wiki extension and the first version of the metavid. Metavid Wiki employs a structured temporal name space with the wiki page model to enable dynamic, versioned metadata for arbitrary stream segments. Congressional data along with stream metadata is used to build a rich query space for stream segment search. These segments can then be recombined into versioned sequences and referenced internally or externally
update: for audio podcasts of the event check out wikipedia weekly
The House and Senate are off this week for Independence Day observence; we’re using this break as an opportunity to break in our brand new admin interface, which makes the numerous behind-the-scenes tasks involved in transcoding and bringing the footage online much more streamlined. By the time Congress returns on the 9th, we expect to be caught up and able to get new footage online within a day or so of air — hopefully sooner.
The House and Senate are off this week for Independence Day observence; we’re using this break as an opportunity to break in our brand new admin interface, which makes the numerous behind-the-scenes tasks involved in transcoding and bringing the footage online much more streamlined. By the time Congress returns on the 9th, we expect to be caught up and able to get new footage online within a day or so of air — hopefully sooner.
Metavid has started to put all the original mpeg2 captures onto archive.org. (Previously we were just removing them because of space considerations) But now when ever you pull up a recent stream you should now have access to the mpeg2 original. For example the senate proceeding for june 4th now links to its associative stream on archive.org. Archive.org also makes the stream available in other formats such as flash flv and mpeg4. To see a list of all the streams available on archive.org so far you can check the U.S congress category.
Watch this space for more interesting collaboration with archive.org in the future:)
Let me be the first to call for more nursery rhymes on the floor of congress. I’ve been looking through ‘One Minute Speeches’ for gems, and found this one:
Let me be the first to call for more nursery rhymes on the floor of congress. I’ve been looking through ‘One Minute Speeches’ for gems, and found this one:
For those of you wondering where the clips of the new 110th congress are, well…. The bad news is that we’ve had some trouble importing the metadata from outside sources and are entering it in by hand, a tedious process which has made it difficult to run the image_crawler scripts which find the ‘person id’ and other useful metadata. The good news is that we have been capturing, so we have the footage - it’s just waiting to be scanned. It will be up soon!
For those of you wondering where the clips of the new 110th congress are, well…. The bad news is that we’ve had some trouble importing the metadata from outside sources and are entering it in by hand, a tedious process which has made it difficult to run the image_crawler scripts which find the ‘person id’ and other useful metadata. The good news is that we have been capturing, so we have the footage - it’s just waiting to be scanned. It will be up soon!
Following the liberalization of their copyright policy earlier this year C-SPAN is now publishing a new index of its House and Senate floor proceedings — The C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle. According to them the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as the Record is available. It only includes members who appeared on the floor to deliver or insert their remarks. The text included is what the member submitted. Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual statements. This is great progress!
Metavid has started to put all the original mpeg2 captures onto