I posted quickly last week about C-SPAN’s Debate Hub, an improved version of their very successful Convention Hubs. Since then I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time getting to know the site better with Leslie Bradshaw, the Communications Manager at C-SPAN project partner New Media Strategies and President of the design agency, JESS3, which created and built the website.
Among the new features the Debate Hub includes is Twitter integration which, like Twitter’s election site, dynamically auto-refreshes real-time updates of what people are saying about debate topics. C-SPAN also pulls in blog and media coverage from dozens of sources from all sides of the political spectrum (TMV among them). You can view all posts as they come in, or filter to a preferred site to see posts from only one source.
But the bright shining star of C-SPAN’s Debate Hub is the multiple ways to navigate video — with transcripts — from the debates. The first feature is the Debate Timeline which allows you to navigate horizontally through the debate chronologically. Each question being discussed at what times and by whom is depicted in an intuitive graphic interface: the moderator yellow, the Democratic candidate blue, Republican red.
Click on the bar for a particular candidate’s answer to a specific question and the transcript pops up. Click on the link and the video clip of the candidate is played. Expand the window and you see both side by side. If you want just a snippet — a particularly noteworthy phrase or comment from the candidate — adjust the slider to select an in and out point, click “Embed” to copy the code, and post just that edited version of the comment to your site.
Then there’s the word tree. C-SPAN’s Debate Hub has a graphical word cloud for the debate, allowing you to visually see the debate’s central themes, sized by prevalence. Click on the block for “Iraq” and you see the transcript excerpt for the 24 times that the word was mentioned during the first debate. Click on DNC for the 13 Times Obama said it. Click on the clip icon to watch the video of that clip. That clip too is editable and embeddable.
If that’s not enough — and believe me that’s a whole lot — the cloud itself is dynamic. Click the checkboxes for Debate 1 and Obama and get a cloud just for him. Click Debate 1 (and later tonight) Debate 2 and Obama and Joe Biden, and get a cloud for the pair in the two debates. A joy to work! and then be able to watch the video from that segment of the debate. While watching the video, you can also pull up the text transcript from the segment to follow along.
The entire Debate Hub is archived — all of the Tweets, blog posts, video, transcripts, and word clouds included — so as the debates accumulate and the site gets exponentially with each debate’s passing. You are able to slice and dice the candidates answers in all kinds of ways. What did John McCain and Sarah Palin say about Iraq? What did Sarah Palin and Joe Biden say about the economy? It’s an incredibly powerful blogger tool.
The goal is to have all this navigation available with a 10-minute delay from what’s happening live. Last Friday they were running at about a 30-minute delay. Even so, this amazing tool makes new dimensions of live-blogging possible for these debates. The site populates as the event passes. That’s a lot of functionality to review in one post moments before the debate begins, I will return to this topic to discuss future plans in another post. For now these tools are ready and waiting for you to explore. So let the debate blogging begin!