CNN Transcripts

CNN provides transcripts for its shows at http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/.

The transcripts are available for shows starting 1999/10/01. See http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1999.10.01.html. However, we get a 'Page not found' error when we follow links until 1999/12/31. So we started scraping the data from 2000/01/01.

CNN went through a few HTML styles of the news transcripts between 2000/01/01and 2014. So there are two scapers to parse the different HTML styles:

• till 2002/9/17
• from 2002/9/17
• from 2014/6/18

Data

The parsed data are posted at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ISDPJU. For copyright reasons, access is restricted for research purposes only. The data are split into 6 files:

• cnn-1.csv. Data from 2000/01/01--2000/04/20. No. of transcripts = 7017
• cnn-2.csv. Data from 2000/04/21--2001/04/03. No. of transcripts = 21381
• cnn-3.csv. Data from 2001/04/04--2002/08/06. No. of transcripts = 35269
• cnn-4.csv. Data from 2002/08/07--2002/09/16. No. of transcripts = 2343
• cnn-5.csv. Data from 2002/09/17--2012/05/18. No. of transcripts = 101336
• cnn-6.csv. Data from 2012/05/19--2014/06/17. No. of transcripts = 23536
• cnn-7.csv. Data from 2014/06/18--2022/02/05. No. of transcripts = 102458

Total number of transcripts: 293,340

Notes

• 2000-04-21 New format error
• 2000-04-22 content within

  and

  tag
• 2001-04-04 No URL prefix, subheader ==> h4, content next table
  tag
• Scripts from 2014