2016 Campaign Television Emotions

Presidential Campaign 2016: Candidate Television Emotions

As part of our efforts to leverage the Internet Archive's Television News Archive for understanding the role of television in politics, we've created the following dashboard, updated each morning, that attempts to assess at a macro level the emotional undercurrents of the conversation on American television news about each of the candidates. Similar to our candidate word clouds, we compile a list of all words appearing within 10 seconds before and after each mention of a candidate's name each day on the television stations monitored by the Internet Archive. These are then run through the entire English language GDELT GCAM emotion pipeline, totaling almost 2,500 discrete emotions. Refer to the specific documentation of any given package for more detail about how each dimension is defined and calculated.

These are based on scanning the closed captioning records of each broadcast, which are subject to a degree of error. At this time the list of words appearing beside each mention of the candidate's name are delivered for processing as a word histogram ngram (1-gram), meaning the format is a list of all words appearing within 10 seconds before/after each mention of the candidate's name and the number of times that word appeared on that station on that day. Sentences are therefore broken into single words and ordered by frequency of appearance. This means that at present all dictionaries and algorithms below are operated in "bag of words" mode, which reduces the accuracy of some of the more sophisticated algorithms that are otherwise capable of incorporating phrasal matches and sequencing logic, though the majority of tools are unaffected by this limitation. The words "trump" and "bush" are removed from consideration due to appearing in several dictionaries, but otherwise no modifications beyond those reported in the GCAM documentation have been performed. A minimum of 25 words must have been monitored about the candidate on the selected stations in a given day for it to be included below, in order to help reduce noise. Those wishing to export the data below in CSV format for further analysis, you can append "&output=csv" to the URL of this page to export the raw timeline in CSV format.

Email kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com with any questions. Permission is granted for any and all use of these graphs in media reports, please cite "Analysis by the GDELT Project using data from the Internet Archive Television News Archive" and report the specific emotion appearing in the Emotion dropdown, such as "Emotion: Anxiety by the Regressive Imagery Dictionary."

NOTICE: As noted above, all emotional scores reported here were calculated completely automatically using the specified dictionary operating in "bag of words" mode. All output is therefore completely algorithmic and automated and in no way reflects any editorial decisions about any given candidate. Remember that these graphs reflect the words spoken on television in the immediate vicinity of mentions of the candidate and thus reflect how television news is framing the candidates, consisting of editorial decisions made by each station including both the words spoken by its anchors and reporters and brief clips of candidates speaking, rather than the language used by the candidates themselves. The Y axis scale and range varies by dimension, please see the documentation for each specific dimension for further details.