
Marion Stokes: A woman who taped 30 years of TV news - onemoresoop
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-48190528/marion-stokes-the-woman-who-taped-30-years-of-tv-news
======
DoubleGlazing
Transdiffusion, a small UK based group of TV presentation enthusiasts, have
been recording and archiving material related to TV logos, idents and
presentation since the 1950s.

[https://www.transdiffusion.org/](https://www.transdiffusion.org/)

------
11thEarlOfMar
Also recently seen on HN: This gentleman recorded 55,000 boxing matches over
40 years:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19471312](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19471312)

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dredmorbius
In the US there is the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, dating to 1968:

 _The core collection of the Archive consists of regularly scheduled newscasts
from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News. Special news reports are recorded in
addition to these newscasts, including material from other networks. We record
broadcasts as they are televised, provide the widest access allowable within
copyright for scholarship and research, and preserve the content for future
generations. The database currently includes 1,116,752 records, including
abstracts at the story level of regular evening newscasts and catalog records
for each special news report._

[https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu](https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu)

[https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/about](https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/about)

The archive itself is not publicly viewable online, but the rundowns are
(including national advertising spots running with the programmes), and are
text searchable. Trends in programme length, topics, and to some extent
quality and bias, are evident. It's a hugely useful, little-known, treasure.

Example; every nightly news story on "privacy" since 1968:

[https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/search?utf8=&query=privacy&but...](https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/search?utf8=&query=privacy&button=)

Archives, including (again, text-searchable) close captioning, here at the
Internet Archive
([https://archive.org/details/tv](https://archive.org/details/tv)), are hugely
useful to researchers and even investigative reporters. Here at WashPo:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/08/televisio...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/08/television-
news-coverage-democrats-is-uneven-not-way-you-might-think/)

Andrew Tyndall, independent news analyst, has monitored TV news since 1988,
publishing review and data at The Tyndall Report:

[http://tyndallreport.com](http://tyndallreport.com)

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legooolas
Would be interesting to know if those tapes have Teletext info which can also
be recovered, as well as the news video:

    
    
      https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext/
    

(Not sure whether this works in the US, as I'm in the UK)

~~~
jimktrains2
The US never used Teletext, but we do have closed captioning, which should be
recoverable and would provide some machine-processable date. Much less than
Teletext would, though, for sure.

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t0mek
It's gonna be awesome to learn history in the next 100, 200 or 500 years.
Video records for all the major and minor events, archived since the second
half of 20th century.

Although they may complain that it's "just a video", not a virtual reality or
something. Also, we need to last that long.

~~~
NateEag
Now that video forgery is easy [1], I think the mountain of video footage will
make learning history in a few hundred years painful and difficult.

How would you have any idea what happened and what didn't, from the 21st
century on?

Yes, historians worked without video or photography for centuries, but most
people aren't as rigorous as a historian, and it's going to take a long time
for our cultural norms to adjust to video being "default untrusted".

Furthermore, the written word and eyewitness testimony aren't nearly as
important in our culture as they used to be, precisely because of the
"pics/video or it didn't happen" mindset. Again, that's what historians have
relied on for centuries, but it's considered unacceptable now in favor of
technology that's just become completely untrustable. There won't _be_
trustable records for people studying our near-future.

Finally, since we've all given up on "primitive" technology like dead trees,
most information is stored digitally now. That's great for convenience but
terrible for long-term archives [2]. Digital information will vanish if not
tended actively and carefully, and historians have long relied on physical
artifacts like letters that largely don't exist any more.

Our culture is a nightmare for future historians.

Edit: expanded on why it will be hard to study history in a few centuries

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake)
2: [http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-
preservation.html](http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html)

~~~
tcbawo
I am not a blockchain enthusiast but proof of authenticity is a use case that
I've heard. It could be used to prove (for example), that a specific video
existed in it's current form at a certain point in time.

~~~
macawfish
That doesn't mean the video is real though!

~~~
acct1771
At least you can track how the propaganda changes focus over time.

~~~
macawfish
True we gotta look on the bright side

------
inflatableDodo
I wonder how many people are doing this now and what media they are storing
to.

~~~
rwmj
I only watch TV through downloads (get_iplayer & youtube-dl), and I have kept
it all [edit: only things I downloaded intending to watch, not all TV]. This
is since about 2008:

    
    
        fs:/volume1/media   14T  8.0T  5.6T  59% /mnt/media
    

The reason? Why not - disks are cheap. The hard thing is deleting something
since I don't know if I might want to watch it again. And at almost no real
cost I don't have to make that decision.

Edit: Some stats: 20,269 TV programmes; 11,830 radio programmes; 925 movies

~~~
mmcwilliams
Do you maintain any kind of database or additional metadata alongside all of
those video files? I only ask because the default filenames generated by
youtube-dl don't give you anything more than the title and ID for a particular
video and I imagine it's difficult to search among tens of thousands of media
files without contextual data about the files.

~~~
rndgermandude
yt-dl has a full-fledged output template system. It's just the default output
template that is only the title+id.

[https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
dl/blob/master/README.md...](https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
dl/blob/master/README.md#output-template)

Also, it has the --write-* switches, in particular --write-info-json, which
allow to store metadata data. in files, and --add-metadata to embed (some) of
the metadata in the file itself.

Of course, the metadata is only as good as the site in question provides + the
yt-dl plugin handing a particular site supports.

~~~
mmcwilliams
I was familiar with the -o template system for filenames, but wasn't aware of
the --write-info-json flag which is very useful to me. It makes a lot more
sense than overloading the filenames with usernames and everything else only
to parse it out after download.

------
trixie_
Anyone know if this has been digitized yet or when it will be available? I am
so impressed by this woman’s work. So much of our history is being lost,
forgotten, or is inaccessible by the general public.

~~~
yitchelle
It was mentioned in the article that the Internet Archive is in the process of
digitizing it. No mentioned of a time frame.

------
hateful
Closest I ever came was recording a few weeks of MTV's 120 minutes.

~~~
jaysonelliot
I've actually been searching for tapes of 120 minutes, since all you can
usually find online are snippets.

Did you ever digitize them?

~~~
nisse72
> _all you can usually find online are snippets_

I haven't looked too closely, but what's this then:

[https://120minutes.tylerc.com/](https://120minutes.tylerc.com/)

~~~
fenwick67
This is basically an index of the music videos played, not an actual recording
of the broadcasts

