The purpose of the SoapJack Project is to build a catalog of YouTube classic soap opera video links organized by their original air dates. Data is provided in JSON and CSV formats in a GitHub repository:

https://github.com/HamiltonBernique/SoapJack/blob/main/README.md

The repository currently has over 26,000 entries that reference YouTube IDs, the last part of a YouTube URL. At present, the data is too voluminous for this website to provide links to each video. You must use the YouTube ID to construct its URL or use pre-formatted links in a spreadsheet from an imported CSV file. For more information see Viewing Videos.

The repository is organized alphabetically by the soap opera codes as listed in SoapJack Soap Operas. A large percentage of dates are approximate. If only the year is known, the date is January 1st or June 1st. If the month is known but not the day, the date is the first of that month. The goal is to eventually arrive at the correct date.

This inventory is of those classic soap operas that aired from the 1950s to the 2010s. This time period essentially spans those decades when no recordings were available except by the efforts of the devoted fans who later uploaded their treasures to YouTube. Some soaps are commercially available in their entirety such as Dark Shadows, so those soaps are not included in the repository.

All channels are reviewed monthly for new additions and removals. The dataset is indeed, rather fluid. For the most part however, soap opera content has remained stable for years on YouTube. Sometimes a channel is terminated, content gets blocked, and public videos are made private. At the same time, channel owners upload new content and new channels need to be included. Such is the churn of this mammoth endeavor, but the rewards are amazing such as the complete series of Peyton Place and several long day-to-day sequences in Another World and As The World Turns.

Generally, content can be one of the following types:

  • Any episode or partial episode.
  • Clips of scenes.
  • Assembled clips of a storyline over time.
  • Episode opening sequences.
  • Episode closing sequences closing credits.
  • Soap promos.
  • Daytime Emmy Award content. Currently, this is only exception to soap opera content.

The following content is not included, subject to feedback:

  • Tributes (except by the soap or network itself).
  • Montages.
  • Reimagined or altered content.
  • Appearances by soap stars in talk shows, commercials, movies, fan greetings, and other venues.

SoapJack data

The data is presented in JSON format where each object is a dictionary about a YouTube video.

Screenshot of the JSON data for a video in the collection.
JSON data dictionary for one of the soap opera videos.

Each soap video has the following properties:

  • id
    The YouTube ID of the video. To watch a video, copy the ID from the JSON data and append to either of the following URLs, where {id} is the YouTube ID:
    https://youtu.be/{id}
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v={id}

    For more information, see View Videos.
  • parentid
    A SoapJack specific property that identifies videos that a part of a series with each video in the series given the same parentid. If not part of a series, leave blank. All videos in the series should have the same date as the first video in the series.

    The ID has the format of “P_” followed by the first eight characters of a guid.
  • soap
    A SoapJack specific property that identifies the soap opera, as shown in parenthesis beside the soap opera names in SoapJack Soap Operas. If adding a new soap opera, use a consistent upper-case initialism of no more than six characters.
  • category
    A SoapJack specific property that identifies the type of content. Currently, this property has three values: A = Episodes and episode clips, B = Promos, opening, and closings, and C = Awards.
  • title
    The title of the video derived from YouTube title property. For the most part, the original titling by the channel owner is preserved but edited for length and consistency. Titles that just had the date and name of the soap are retitled as ‘Episode’, as the date will populate the date property. If the duration of the video is less than 20 minutes, it’s titled as ‘Episode content’.

    Optimally, the length of the title should be no more than 35 characters for future mobile applications.
  • date
    A SoapJack specific property not to be confused with the YouTube date, which is the date the video was uploaded to YouTube. The SoapJack date is the date the episode was originally broadcast, or approximate date. Dates when only the year is known have the date as January 1. Dates when only the month is known use the first of the month. This is a required value, even if it’s just a wild guess.

    Because of estimations, several videos erroneously have the date of January 1. This is by design. Efforts will be made to work through these to have more accurate dates.
  • part
    A SoapJack specific property that identifies the part number of a series. The default is 1.
  • total
    A SoapJack specific property that identifies the total number of parts in the series. The default is 1.
  • duration
    The length of the video obtained from YouTube duration property.
  • channel
    The YouTube channel that hosts the video, obtained from the channelName property in YouTube and converted to lower case with spaces and special characters removed.

YouTube data scraping

HamiltonBernique recommends the YouTube and Fast YouTube scrapers provided by Apify. They are consistently reliable and easy to use. The Fast YouTube scraper is sufficient and provides the following fields needed for the data:

– id
– title
– duration

All of the other SoapJack data properties can be derived. Sometimes date information is provided by the channel owner in a description of the video if not in the title. To get this scrape the text field, which is available only with the full (not fast) YouTube scraper.

Feedback and contributions

Send your feedback, corrections, and musings to Bruce Hamilton at this email address:

bruce@hamiltonbernique.com

The project always needs to know about channels that are hosting soap opera content, and your corrections to dates are highly appreciated. Even if you have a hunch that an episode occurred earlier or later than shown, I want to hear about it.

All the YouTube contributor channels are checked monthly for new videos and for videos that have been removed. Nevertheless, if you come across a removed video you’re welcome to report it.

In your email, you need to include only the ID of the YouTube video with your edits, or just channel name of the soaps you think should be added to the repository. If editing data for multiple videos, you can share an online spreadsheet to created from a CSV file. For more information, see View Videos.

GitHub pull requests

If you are a developer experienced with JSON and GitHub, you can create a fork of the repository and submit a pull request. CSV files will be made from your contributions.

Before proceeding, please email bruce@hamiltonbernique.com to confer on specifics.