Recently, the Nieman Journalism Lab reported on OpenCaptions, the creation of Dan "Truth Goggles" Schultz. OpenCaptions prepares a live television transcript from closed captions, which can then be analyzed. I came across OpenCaptions back in October, when I learned about Schultz's work on Truth Goggles, which highlights web content that has been fact checked by PolitiFact. Reading about it this time reminded me of something I'd written in my critique of the fact checking industry's opinions about factuality comparison among individual politicians.
At the end of that post, I commented on a suggestion made by Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center about how to measure the volume of factuality that a politician pumps into the mediasphere. Jamieson's suggestion was to weight the claims that a politician makes by the size of their audience. I pointed out some weaknesses of this factuality metric. I also recognized that it is still useful, and described the data infrastructure necessary to calculate the metric. Basically, you need to know the size of the audience of a political broadcast (say, a political advertisement), the content of the broadcast, and the soundness of the arguments made during the broadcast.
OpenCaptions shows promise as a way to collect the content of political broadcasts and publish it to the web for shared analysis. Cheers to Dan Schultz for creating yet another application that will probably be part of the future of journalism...and fact checking...and factuality metrics.