Preserving 2008 US Presidential Election Videos

Online digital video hosting and sharing sources are becoming increasingly popular. People are not only uploading and viewing videos at these sites, but are also discussing them. In addition to the comments, visitors also rate and link these videos. Statistics about these and other user behaviors on such sites can tell us a lot about social trends and patterns, which in turn can serve as important context to aid in interpreting archival materials. We are interested in analyzing the correlation between this behavior and an actual social event. We chose the 2008 US Presidential Election as the event and YouTube as the video source. In this paper we report a system that facilitates harvesting presidential election videos from YouTube along with corresponding metadata and contextual information. The system is built to revisit the same video pages periodically and collect the contextual information for every visit. From this data we are hoping to understand various social behaviors that may help us finding some interesting connections with the real-life events and results and inform digital video curatorial policies.