<p><div><div><div><div data-show-faces="false" data-height="21" data-width="100" data-layout="button_count" data-send="true" data-href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/retrieve-process-tv-news-chyrons-with-newsflash/"></div></div><div></div></div><div></div></div>
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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="https://rud.is/b/2017/10/01/retrieve-process-tv-news-chyrons-with-newsflash/"> R – rud.is</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<p>The Internet Archive <a rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.archive.org/2017/09/21/tv-news-chyron-data/" target="_blank">recently announced</a> a new service they’ve dubbed ‘Third Eye’. This service scrapes the chyrons that annoyingly scroll across the bottom-third of TV news broadcasts. IA has a vast historical archive of TV news that they’ll eventually process, but — for now — the more recent broadcasts from four channels are readily available. There’s tons of information about the project <a rel="nofollow" href="https://archive.org/details/third-eye" target="_blank">on its main page</a> where you can interactively work with the API if that’s how you roll.</p>
<p>Since my <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/hrbrmstr/newsflash" target="_blank"><code>newsflash</code><img alt="🔗" src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2/72x72/1f517.png" class="wp-smiley"></a> package already had a “news” theme and worked with the joint IA-GDELT project TV data, it seemed to be a good home for a Third Eye interface to live.</p>
<h3>Basic usage</h3>
<p>You can read long-form details of the Third Eye service on their site. The TLDR is that they provide two feeds:</p>
<ul>
<li>a “raw” one which has massive duplicates and tons of errors</li>
<li>a “clean” one that filters out duplicates, cleans up the text and is much better to work with</li>
</ul>
<p>You can retrieve either with <code>newsflash::read_chyrons()</code> but the default is to use the clean feed. If you are studying text processing and or NLP/text-cleanup via machine learning, then the raw feed may be very interesting for you. I suspect most data journalists will want to use the clean feed that also powers the IA chyron twitter bots.</p>
<p>Since it’s the Internet Archive, they’re awesome at providing metadata about their data. Heck, even their metadata has metadata about metadata. We can use the fact that they provide a metadata feed to enable listing available chyron archive dates:</p>
<pre><code>library(newsflash) # devtools::install_github(&quot;hrbrmstr/newsflash&quot;)
library(hrbrthemes)
library(tidyverse)

list_chyrons()
## # A tibble: 61 x 3
##            ts    type     size
##        </code></pre>