Notes

See Face-O-Matic code on GitHub.

Through May 2018, we tracked the appearances of current president, most former living presidents and recent major party presidential contenders, as well as the four congressional leaders on TV news:

The Face-o-Matic data set, available for download on the Internet Archive, reflects facial recognition of the faces of prominent public officials as they appear on major cable TV news networks: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. The list of public officials tracked, along with the date that detection began, is here:

President & current congressional leaders
President Donald Trump, 7/13/17
Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis., 7/13/17
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., 7/13/17
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., 7/13/17
Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, D., N.Y., 7/13/17

Former living presidents and recent major party presidential candidates*
Barack Obama, 7/13/17
Bill Clinton, 9/12/17
Hillary Clinton, 9/12/17
Mitt Romney, 10/4/17
George H.W. Bush, 10/5/17
Jimmy Carter, 10/21/17
George W. Bush, 11/1/17


"Results" files contain Face-O-Matic results. Zip file includes data separated by month. They contain the following fields:
Label = standardized name
Name = name of person tracked
Network = TV news network
Program = name of program
Air Date = date program aired
Air Time = time program aired, UTC time zone
Duration = duration of clip where face appears, in seconds
URL = link to clip on the TV News Archive, where it may be viewed
Model = set of faces used in Face-o-Matic tool used to generate set of data

"Programs" files, also updated nightly, contain the programs and durations of those programs that we scanned. We suggest using this file to normalize "results" data when comparing one network to another. The reason: some networks air more hours of TV news than others, and raw results would be skewed toward those networks.

Program files field names:
Program ID = unique ID for a particular program
Network = name of TV news network
Air Time = time program aired, UTC time zone
Program = name of program
Duration = seconds archived of this program on this date and time by the TV News Archive

Outages
We occasionally experience outages in TV news collection. Outages can occur for a number of reasons, from weather conditions to faulty equipment. For this reason, we recommend caution when doing analyses based on date, particularly when examining severe dips in news coverage of people who usually receive high levels of attention on TV news. The dip may be authentic, but it may also be due to a break in collections.

Ethics
Our concentration on public officials and our bipartisan tracking is purposeful; in experimenting with this technology, we strive to respect individual privacy and extract only information for which there is a compelling public interest, such as the role the public sees our elected officials playing through the filter of TV news. The TV News Archive is committed to doing this right by adhering to these principles for ethical research developed by leading artificial intelligence researchers, ethicists, and others at a January 2017 conference organized by the Future of Life Institute. As we go forward with our experiments, we will continue to explore these questions in conversations with experts and the public.