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Jan. 6, 2017, 12:42 p.m.
Reporting & Production
LINK: blog.archive.org  ➚   |   Posted by: Shan Wang   |   January 6, 2017

President-elect Donald J. Trump says a lot of things — and often denies a lot of the things he’s said.

The Internet Archive launched Thursday a huge Trump Archive dedicated to housing videos of everything Trump’s said on video: in everything from broadcast speeches, debates, interviews, and newscasts about the President-elect. The archive currently contains more than 700 videos — that’s more than 520 hours of Trump — compiled by way of the TV News Archive, the Internet Archive’s broadcast tracking resource, and currently dates back to December 2009 (Trump formally announced his candidacy June of 2015).

The library contains more than 500 statements made on video by Trump that were then factchecked by FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Fact Checker from the Washington Post.

The Trump archive builds on the work of the Political TV ad archive, launched last spring to help groups track campaign spots throughout the election season. Nancy Watzman, managing editor of the Internet Archive’s Television Archive, wrote in a post about the Trump archive launch:

We draw on this material, and our experience with building the successful Political TV Ad Archive, to create a curated collection of material related to Trump, with an emphasis on fact-checked statements. The video is searchable, quotable, and shareable on social media….

By providing a free and enduring source for TV news broadcasts of Trump’s statements, the Internet Archive hopes to make it more efficient for the media, researchers, and the public to track Trump’s statements while fact-checking and reporting on the new administration. The Trump Archive can also serve as a rich treasure trove of video material for any creative use: comedy, art, documentaries, wherever people’s inspiration takes them.

We consider the Trump Archive to be an experimental model for creating similar archives for other public officials. For example, we’ll explore the idea of creating curated collections for Trump’s nominees to head federal agencies; members of Congress of both parties (for example, perhaps the Senate and House majority and minority leadership); Supreme Court nominees, and so on.

A new searchable repository from Factbase is now also available and allows users to search by text through Trump’s tweets, speeches, and written policies — 2.5 million total words, and counting (e.g., 108 references to “dishonest media” so far).

Now we can all let loose our inner KFiles.

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