A Woman Who Recorded 70k Tapes of American News

I imagine this would be a treasure trove for an artist like Kenneth Goldsmith [0]. He has a moving book consisting of verbatim transcriptions of broadcast shows that were aired during several tragic events in US history [1]. Or another book (800 pages; yep, I read it through) capturing every word he spoke during a week [2].<p>When served well, verbatim transcriptions can make a fascinating or very emotional form of art. It&#x27;s like this stuff, with all the stutterings, illogical sentences etc, is occasionally more directly &quot;wired to my head&quot;, and thus closer to sensing the other person&#x27;s &quot;thinking&quot;, than a regular, careful literary composition. Then again, it is probably also easier to &quot;overuse&quot;, I guess.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kenneth_Goldsmith" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kenneth_Goldsmith</a><p>1: &quot;Seven American Deaths and Disasters&quot; -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;16071842-seven-american-deaths-and-disasters" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;16071842-seven-american-...</a><p>2: &quot;Soliloquy&quot; -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;764257.Soliloquy?ac=1&amp;from_search=true&amp;qid=LlvKjMzwth&amp;rank=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;764257.Soliloquy?ac=1&amp;fr...</a>

We should be very protective of this archive, those that produce the news want it to be extremely compelling and convincing for the narrative they&#x27;re writing, but instantly forgotten in time for the next crisis. The patterns that will emerge from this will be damning, and I suspect that efforts will be taken to ensure those patterns remain forgotten.

It would be great if the audio could be transcribed and the text ran through some ML models that could analyze attributes over time, like:<p>sentiment, new use of words (ideas &amp; technologies), the varying viewpoints for the same story, correlations between when something was first announced to later outcomes, etc.<p>From this it would be possible to show in a compelling way how the hearts and minds of the masses are shaped by the media they consume.

The saddest part of the story:<p><i>&quot;At the time Stokes began recording, television stations had been deleting archives for decades&quot;</i><p>For-profit corporations can not be trusted to archive history.

&quot;That material truly doesn&#x27;t exist anywhere.&quot;<p>Technically, doesn&#x27;t the data exist as radiowaves traveling at lightspeed away from their broadcast source on earth?

&gt; her recordings, which have been acquired by the Internet Archive in Richmond, California<p>Thank you Internet Archive!

Any word on the internet archive&#x27;s progress on this?

This reminds me of the (I believe) NYT article on the woman whose husband recorded tens of thousands of wrestling matches on VHS tapes. The archive was sought after by fans of the sport, but since the man&#x27;s passing - the wife has struggled to maintain the collection and was contemplating tossing it.

I really like how this website implemented their companion audio player. It was a smart touch to have play&#x2F;pause on any play-button on the page animate some sort of ghost effect to bring your attention to the player in the corner.<p>It&#x27;s a clean, well-done, fast site in general. Not something I expect from a radio station.

&quot;To make the film, Wolf developed a complex system to index and identify the 70,000 tapes, which were all six to eight hours long.<p>In the end, he only digitized 100 of the tapes and says those 700 hours are “a tiny scratch into the surface of what&#x27;s there.”&quot;<p>Wow, what a treasure trove!

I really hope that all those archives will be digitized and available for download.

What sparked Ms Stokes interest in recording the news happens to coincide with my news awakening. The hostage crisis and Love Canal (which started when I was around seven or eight) jump started my new obsession.

Anyone who doesn&#x27;t like hearing very loud flyback transformer whine should avoid playing the last few seconds of the embedded video.<p>I think what Stokes did in recording those tapes was outstanding, by the way.

Anybody want to dig up links to the older threads about this? I can&#x27;t just now...

<i>&quot;At the time Stokes began recording, television stations had been deleting archives for decades, Wolf says.&quot;</i><p>wtf.. stations delete their own footage? wouldn&#x27;t you want to just hang on to everything indefinitely?

See also: the Vanderbilt Television News Archive.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvnews.vanderbilt.edu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvnews.vanderbilt.edu</a>

Will this documentary be downloadable or released on DVD? I&#x27;d like to buy it.

Something of a side point, but I&#x27;m curious about how expensive this was for her to do.<p>In the 80s &#x2F; 90s wouldn&#x27;t a blank 3hr video be something like $5 or so (I&#x27;m guessing, as I recollect it was about £5 or so, and am expecting they&#x27;d be cheaper in the US as most things seemed to be then)<p>Given that 70k hrs would be around 23k 3hr cassettes, that would work out at maybe $115k. Seems a lot for an ex-Communist organiser to have ready to spend on a project like this (much as it has plenty of merit).

Next: a man who recorded 10 years of hacker news links

This has been posted on HN before.

Isn&#x27;t this copyright infringement? I think there&#x27;s a fair use for recording and keeping for a period but recording everything for 30 years isn&#x27;t that.