2017 Medford MA candidates

Excerpts of transcribed videos from the 2017 Medford MA candidates for Mayor, City Council, and School Committee.

*=Incumbent

These links go to a dedicated page for each candidate containing a compilation of all their excerpts extracted from the transcribed videos and include timestamped links to the original source video. Similar pages exist for candidates and a handful of important public employees here. Word counts for each candidate are also included, intended as a very rough proxy for who's active. A challenger having few appearances/words in these excerpts doesn't necessarily say much about them. Many successful candidates in the past did not appear in any videos prior to their election.

A great use of these pages is to use your browser's search function to find where candidates mention topics that are important to you, then you can watch the corresponding video in its full context.

One may also wish to upload these pages to ChatGPT then ask for help synthesizing the results more globally. However, be warned it heavily weights the beginning of the file (the most recent excerpts), and will happily fill in missing information with convincing -- but totally ficticious -- misinformation. It's significantly better when asked to compare two things ("rank the candidates on XX"), but in general, treat the results from ChatGPT as a you would something written by a mid-level high school student.

The videos are transcriptions of (nearly) all videos at the YouTube channels listed here, which are predominantly city council and school committee meetings, but also include campaign channels, news sources, and other channels dedicated to local politics, including partisans on both sides (I can only include YouTube channels, but if I'm missing any, please let me know).