Channelography

"Channelography creates statistics about BBC Programmes by reading and analysing the captions."

http://channelography.rattlecentral.com

This is brilliant. Although it's not completely accurate just yet (and I think it takes the subtitles from the iPlayer as well, so the stats aren't completely representative) the website reveals some interesting statistics about BBC programming, as well as listing the top ten most repeated programmes per channel.

Twitter has been verbally mentioned at least 126 times across the BBC television network since September and Tesco is the most name-dropped organisation on BBC Three with 55 mentions. Scotland appears to have been the most talked about country on the BBC News channel over the last four months, while men are mentioned over three times as much as women on BBC One.

If you click on a programme title it will also give you a full transcript of the subtitles from the programme.

Not a particularly useful service. Highlighting trends in words only leads to misleading statistics.

Twitter is mentioned a lot because the BBC have twitter feeds for some of their programmes. Take all the editions of 'Question Time' into account and that's at least 30 of the references to Twitter accounted for as the presenter always links to the BBC's question time feed.

Tesco are often on the BBC News Channel as they're often making headlines, and BBC Three recently had a documentary exploring Tesco's impact on the environment which has probably been repeated a few times. Suddenly the statistic isn't quite so shocking anymore.

As for men being mentioned more than women, I'm not sure why that would be, but I don't think it demonstrates a BBC bias; they'll interview the most appropriate person for their programme, and failing that they'll take whoever they can get hold of.

The feed suggests CBeebies is promoting 'Guess' clothing and 'Red Bee Media'. I imagine the word 'guess' appears a lot on children's programmes, and Red Bee Media do the subtitles so they'll flag up on the end of most programmes.

This service would need so, so much work if it is to ever resemble something vaguely interesting or useful.

Of course it's interesting. It's very much so to look at. Useful? Not really. Reliable if trying to make some political point? Definitely not. As something to read, definitely worth it.