Video archive of the US Congress
The US House, having just passed the stimulus package after hours of contentious debates and procedural motions, moved on to more serious business: congratulating the winners of the Super Bowl. Here’s a short clip of somebody off-camera airing their opinion. This somehow didn’t make it into the official record. The gem is @01:26.
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At present, the #1 most discussed political clip on YouTube is a very short 16 second clip of Chuck Schumer claiming Americans don’t care about pork barrel spending.
The neat thing about Metavid is that because we archive the full day of proceedings, we can take that same 16 second clip and expand coverage from either side and provide context to an otherwise self-encapsulated sound byte. Here we can see Chuck’s quote as part of a larger rhetorical flourish; he calls for the removal of the pork spending and highlights what he sees are the important elements of the bill. Here is the the clip on Metavid:
Furthermore we can expand to see Schumer’s entire speech on Metavid: And even the full day of debate.
The ability to dig deeper and investigate a given argument that is being presented is fundamental to understanding what is really taking place. This is why a citation framework for web video is so important for healthy deliberation. This way, the context (and contextualization) of a given source document can be investigated. Tools like Metavid open up this citation process for continued dialog in contrast to allowing the clip fragment to act as the final word.
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Although it’s a bit late coming, I’m happy (and somewhat relieved :P) to announce that we’ve finally brought the all 2009 footage of the new 111th congress online, from Jan 6 to the present. Now that our capture system is fully functional (see earlier post), we plan on having new proceedings in the Metavid system within 24 hrs. Anyway, we encourage you to dig through the last few weeks of footage. Some highlights include:
And my personal favorite of the month, an especially raucous &celebratory House Session from just before Obama’s inauguration on the 20th:
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Let me be the first to call for more nursery rhymes on the floor of congress. I’ve been looking through ‘One Minute Speeches’ for gems, and found this one:
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Let me be the first to call for more nursery rhymes on the floor of congress. I’ve been looking through ‘One Minute Speeches’ for gems, and found this one:
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For those of you wondering where the clips of the new 110th congress are, well…. The bad news is that we’ve had some trouble importing the metadata from outside sources and are entering it in by hand, a tedious process which has made it difficult to run the image_crawler scripts which find the ‘person id’ and other useful metadata. The good news is that we have been capturing, so we have the footage - it’s just waiting to be scanned. It will be up soon!
In the meantime, here are some of the last speeches of 02006.
Update: 02007 streams are coming online. We hope to have the House’s war “debate” up by Beyond Broadcast this weekend.
3 comments aphid
For those of you wondering where the clips of the new 110th congress are, well…. The bad news is that we’ve had some trouble importing the metadata from outside sources and are entering it in by hand, a tedious process which has made it difficult to run the image_crawler scripts which find the ‘person id’ and other useful metadata. The good news is that we have been capturing, so we have the footage - it’s just waiting to be scanned. It will be up soon!
In the meantime, here are some of the last speeches of 02006.
Update: 02007 streams are coming online. We hope to have the House’s war “debate” up by Beyond Broadcast this weekend.
Add comment dale
As everyone already knows Mark Foley ran into some trouble for being a sexual predator, and I guess this cultural values warrior had previous relations with pages from as long ago as 2000. If there is one thing corporate media does well its sex scandals. I wish people had to resign when it was discovered they were misinforming about other issues. But soon we will be the media so maybe that will change a few things…
Anyway in the long tradition of hypocrisy and moral politics here Mark Foley rants on Internet Predators.
The clips were located by first setting up advanced search and listing all the clips by Mark Foley. Then I adjusted the url for the desired segment. I have noticed a few others pointing to this already. Feel free to share this clip 
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