Emotional Explorer: Explore the Emotion of American Television News

This tool makes use of the Internet Archive's Television News Archive to make it possible to visualize and explore the emotion of American television news coverage. It processes the closed captioning of each broadcast (more than half a million hours covering the last four years) through 18 major content analysis packages that assess 2,238 emotional and thematic dimensions of each broadcast. Unlike the Television Trends Tracker, the graphs here only run from June 2010 through the beginning of September 2014 and do not update. Processing was performed using the GDELT Project pipeline running in the Internet Archive's Virtual Reading Room as part of reimagining libraries.

Select one of the 2,238 emotions/themes from the list below and then click on the Make Timeline button at the bottom of this form. Note that the Internet Archive Television News Archive currently only monitors a subset of stations, with some stations starting later than others, so please ensure you are familiar with the Television News Archive's collections before relying on the results here. For more information on the nuances of a specific emotional or thematic dimension, please refer to the documentation about each tool.

Select the emotion from the list below of 2,238 emotions.


By default all television networks monitored by the Internet Archive are searched. You can use the dropdown below to limit the search to a specific television network. You can also narrow the search time period - this is especially useful to compare stations using the barchart graph below. NOTE that some networks were added to the Archive later than others, and thus the Start Date will automatically adjust as needed.

Limit to Television Network: Date Range: Start: End:



Emotion Score Over Time: Regressive Imagery Dictionary: EMOTIONS/ANXIETY

The timeline below displays the density of the selected emotion/theme across all monitored television broadcasts on all networks monitored by the Internet Archive by day, representing the percentage of words in those broadcasts connoting this emotion/theme. Note that some television networks were not added to the Archive's list of monitored television stations until later which can affect these results in some circumstances. The blue line shows the raw density scores by day, while the red line displays a 7-day rolling average to smooth the data and make macro-level patterns more apparent. You can click on the blue/red dots at the top right of the timeline graph to toggle either timeline on/off to rescale the graph.


Average Emotion Score By Network: Regressive Imagery Dictionary: EMOTIONS/ANXIETY

The barchart below shows the breakdown by television network of where the selected emotion appears in the greatest density. Note that some television networks were not added to the Archive's list of monitored television stations until later which can affect these results in some circumstances.





Emotional Explorer: Explore the Emotion of American Television News
A GDELT Project analysis tool by Kalev Leetaru
Uses NVD3 and GCAM