The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research Volume 2 Article 1 11-15-2015 Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the Research Agenda Robert X. Browning Purdue University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse Part of the American Politics Commons Recommended Citation Browning, Robert X. (2015) "Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the Research Agenda," The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research: Vol. 2 , Article 1. Available at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse/vol2/iss1/1 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the Research Agenda Cover Page Footnote To purchase a hard copy of this publication, visit: http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/format/ 9781557537348 This article is available in The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse/vol2/iss1/1 Browning: Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the Research Agenda EXPLORING THE C-SPAN ARCHIVES Advancing the Research Agenda Published by Purdue e-Pubs, 2015 1 The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Vol. 2 [2015], Art. 1 https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse/vol2/iss1/1 2 Browning: Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the Research Agenda EXPLORING THE C-SPAN ARCHIVES Advancing the Research Agenda edited by Robert X. Browning Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Indiana Published by Purdue e-Pubs, 2015 3 The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Vol. 2 [2015], Art. 1 Copyright 2016 by Robert X. Browning. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress. Paper ISBN: 978-1-55753-734-8 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-61249-440-1 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-61249-441-8 https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse/vol2/iss1/1 4 Browning: Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the Research Agenda To the memory of my sister, Barbara Browning Published by Purdue e-Pubs, 2015 5 The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Vol. 2 [2015], Art. 1 https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse/vol2/iss1/1 6 Browning: Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the Research Agenda CONTENTS FOREWORD ix PREFACE xiii CHAPTER 1 Going Beyond the Anecdote: The C-SPAN Archives and Uncovering the Ritual of Presidential Debates in the Age of Cable News 1 Kathryn Cramer Brownell CHAPTER 2 Framing Technological Influence Through C-SPAN 23 Alison N. Novak and Ernest A. Hakanen CHAPTER 3 Image Bite Analysis of Presidential Debates 45 Erik P. Bucy and Zijian Harrison Gong CHAPTER 4 Expressive Polarization in Political Discourse 77 stonegarden grindlife CHAPTER 5 C-SPAN, MOOCs, and the Post-Digital Age 103 David A. Caputo CHAPTER 6 Using the C-SPAN Archives: Evidence in Policymakers’ Discourse on Science 115 Mary L. Nucci Published by Purdue e-Pubs, 2015 7 The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Vol. 2 [2015], Art. 1 CHAPTER 7 Personal Narratives and Representation Strategies: Using C-SPAN Oral Histories to Examine Key Concepts in Minority Representation 139 Nadia E. Brown, Michael D. Minta, and Valeria Sinclair-Chapman CHAPTER 8 “Mom-In-Chief” Rhetoric as a Lens for Understanding Policy Advocacy: A Thematic Analysis of Video Footage From Michelle Obama’s Speeches 165 Ray Block Jr. and Christina S. Haynes CHAPTER 9 The Performance of Roll Call Votes as Political Cover in the U.S. Senate: Using C-SPAN to Analyze the Vote to Repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” 191 Christopher Neff CHAPTER 10 Public Understandings of Women in STEM: A Prototype Analysis of Governmental Discourse From the C-SPAN Video Library 213 Lauren Berkshire Hearit and Patrice M. Buzzanell CHAPTER 11 If a Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, What Is a Video Worth? 241 Bryce J. Dietrich CHAPTER 12 Reflections and a Look Ahead 265 Patrice M. Buzzanell CONTRIBUTORS 277 INDEX 285 https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse/vol2/iss1/1 8 Browning: Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the Research Agenda THE C-SPAN ARCHIVES AS THE POLICYMAKING RECORD OF AMERICAN REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: A FOREWORD lmost two centuries ago, the idea of research libraries, and the possibil- Aity of building them at scale, began to be realized. Although we can find these libraries at every major college and university in the world today, and at many noneducational research institutions, this outcome was by no means obvious at the time. And the benefits we all now enjoy from their existence were then at best merely vague speculations. How many would have supported the formation of these institutions at the time, without knowing the benefits that have since become obvious? After all, the arguments against this massive ongoing expenditure are impressive. The proposal was to construct large buildings, hire staff, purchase all manner of books and other publications and catalogue and shelve them, provide access to visitors, and continually reorder all the books that the visitors disorder. And the libraries would keep the books, and fund the whole operation, in perpetu- ity. Publications would be collected without anyone deciding which were of ix Published by Purdue e-Pubs, 2015 9 The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Vol. 2 [2015], Art. 1 x FOREWORD high quality and thus deserving of preservation — leading critics to argue that all this effort would result in expensive buildings packed mostly with junk. To make matters even more confusing, the critics turned out to be right: Most research libraries today are predominantly filled with publications that interest no one. To take one example, more than half the books in the libraries at my own university have not been checked out even once. Yet, the central benefit of these hugely important institutions has turned out to come from collecting the exhaustive record of human thought and activities in some area or areas, making it possible for future scholars to make discoveries from this material that could not have been foreseen at the time. And the progress since has been spectacular. Such must have been the case three decades ago when Robert X. Browning and his colleagues were trying to set up the C-SPAN Archives. You can almost hear the arguments: C-SPAN is not exactly the most popular TV network, even when it runs live debates of current interest, and now Browning is plan- ning to preserve in perpetuity the 17th hour of a Senate filibuster being taped at 2 a.m., with three senators in the chamber watching? It is a good thing for society and American democracy that Browning won those arguments. We now have more than 214,000 hours of videos con- stituting the primary, and in most cases the only, visual and audio record of the policymaking process in the world’s leading representative democracy. With the vision we now all have with hindsight, we can see that it is a true shame that the visual record of prior policy and politics in America is now lost forever. Fortunately, this is no longer the case, and perhaps will never be the case from here on out. The C-SPAN Archives has produced obvious benefits for the public in understanding governmental debates and policies through the many hun- dreds of thousands of these videos watched and studied every year. But, just like research libraries, the most important benefits of the C-SPAN Archives are those which were unknown when the Archives was formed. And that is the point of this important volume — to record, explain, and build on the fast progress being made in the fields of research that have grown up around, as a result of, or coincident with the Archives. I am especially interested in the progress in research turning text, au- dio, and video into actionable research data. Few could have imagined in the 1980s that the VHS tapes being filed on shelves and in boxes in West Lafayette, https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse/vol2/iss1/1 10 Browning: Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the Research Agenda FOREWORD xi Indiana, would eventually be digitized. Fewer still could have understood that developments in methodology, statistics, machine learning, and data science would turn this digitized treasure trove into informative research data capable of producing insights and measures crucial to social science inquiry. These include automated measures of emotion, nonverbal behavior, crowd counts, interactions, and numerous other crucial indicators valuable for a wide range of social and political research. The C-SPAN Archives not only has a bright future, but it has helped cre- ate one for us all as we shed light on how democracy works in America. The research benefiting from the Archives, and well represented in this impres- sive book, is teaching us a great deal. In this sense, the original vision of the founders of the C-SPAN Archives is having a bigger impact now than it ever has. We should all be glad that this book is being printed and copied, and is due to be stored in the world’s libraries in perpetuity. Gary King Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor Director, Institute for Quantitative Social Science Harvard University Published by Purdue e-Pubs, 2015 11 The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Vol. 2 [2015], Art. 1 https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse/vol2/iss1/1 12 Browning: Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the Research Agenda PREFACE t has been my pleasure to edit and now present the second volume of papers Ifrom the November 2014 Advancing the Research Agenda conference. At that conference, 16 scholars presented pathbreaking research conducted using the C-SPAN Archives.