New Database: American Archive of Public Broadcasting

From the Press Release:

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a collaboration between the Library of Congress, WGBH Boston and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, launched a new website at americanarchive.org today, providing the public with access to a collection of American public radio and television content dating back to the 1950s. These audio and video materials, created by more than 120 public broadcasting organizations across the country, have now been digitized and preserved, and will be a resource for scholars, researchers, educators, filmmakers and the general public to delve into the rich history of public broadcasting across America.

The website will initially provide access to 2.5 million inventory records created during the American Archive Content Inventory Project. The records will provide information about which public media video and audio materials have been digitized and preserved in the AAPB, indicate which video and audio files are available for research on location at WGBH and the Library of Congress, and highlight the participating stations. Contributing stations’ histories, information about significant productions and resources for participating organizations will be available online.

Source: Library of Congress

Access Archive of Public Broadcasting

Mining Large-scale TV Group Viewing Patterns for Group Recommendation

Description:

We present a large-scale study of television viewing habits, focusing on how individuals adapt their preferences when consuming content in group settings. While there has been a great deal of recent work on modeling individual preferences, there has been considerably less work studying the behavior and preferences of groups, due mostly to the difficulty of data collection in these settings. In contrast to past work that has relied either on small-scale surveys or prototypes, we explore more than 4 million logged views paired with individual-level demographic and co-viewing information to uncover variation in the viewing patterns of individuals and groups. Our analysis reveals which genres are popular among specific demographic groups when viewed individually, how often individuals from different demographic categories participate in group viewing, and how viewing patterns change in various group contexts. Furthermore, we leverage this large-scale dataset to directly estimate how individual preferences are combined in group settings, finding subtle deviations from traditional preference aggregation functions. We present a simple model which captures these effects and discuss the impact of these findings on the design of group recommendation systems.

Source: Microsoft Research

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