August 2020 – sobre.arquivo.pt

Last updated on June 18th, 2021 at 08:26 am

Suggest web pages about Covid-19

Arquivo.pt invites everyone to suggest web pages that document the Covid-19 pandemic to be preserved for future access. Help us to keep a complete memory of the Portuguese live during this period.

Suggest pages using this form: https://tinyurl.com/arquivopt-covid19

Thousands of web pages to tell the story of the pandemic in Portugal

Arquivo.pt has been carrying out special collections of web pages related to the Covid-19 pandemic since March 2020.

“Future academics, scientists and journalists who are studying the Portuguese response to the Covid-19 pandemic will want to read first-hand testimonies of those affected, official records of the number of victims, and recommendations from doctors, politicians and scientists at the time” , Público newspaper, May 1, 2020 edition.

Daily, content was collected from a set of 106 sites on the theme of Covid-19. This set includes, for example, websites for the media, government, associations and university initiatives.

In another set are Twitter pages (108 identified in May), Youtube videos (815 identified in May) and also pages from Reddit and Git Hub.

Suggestions from the community were included. For example, Archivists from Sines (Portugal) collected local news related to Covid-19 (9 GB). The Revisionista.pt project also contributed and identified pages from newspapers. People sent suggestions through the public form.

Collaboration with IIPC for international collection

In February 2020, the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), the main organization on Web preservation, proposed to its members a collection about the Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak.

Arquivo.pt contributed with 1 237 seeds, mainly in Portuguese. With successive contributions from other countries, the IIPC collection reached over 7 000 pages in July 2020.

A form is also available for anyone to suggest content for this international collection.

The IIPC collection “Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)” is accessible via the Internet Archive Archive-it.

Arquivo.pt carried out 3 collections of the international collection compiled by the IIPC, the 1st on March 23 the 2nd on June 15 and the 3rd on late August, thus gathering international content useful for worldwide researchers.

Methodology for the selection of pages for the Covid-19 collection

We started by identifying terms related to the Coronavirus theme that included health, economic, political, geographic or organizational aspects.

Then, the Bing Azure service was used to automatically obtain, through a script, the following information for the first 10 results for each term: the page address, the title and the position in the results list.

Considering the list of results, it was decided which software would be used and which settings would be the best to collect the pages.

For example, in the case of a newspaper section dedicated to Covid-19, it was necessary to decide whether to record just one page or whether it makes sense to collect the entire site exhaustively.

Various types of software were used to collect the pages. For daily collections from 106 sites Heritrix was used. For capturing 108 Twitter accounts, Brozzler was chosen and for videos, manual capture using Webrecorder and Browsertrix.

Know more

1st place – “Desarquivo”

The winner of the 10,000 euros prize was the work “ Desarquivo ” developed by Miguel Ramalho.

“Desarquivo” is a website that enables searching for named entities (e.g. people, organizations and places) and identify relationships among them, based on news published in online newspapers along time.

The search results are presented in the form of a graph or network of relationships that enables a journalist, researcher or any common citizen to dynamically explore the relationships among historical information preserved from the Web by Arquivo.pt.

For example, a user can explore ideological proximity among political parties along time.

3rd place – “Arquivo Económico .pt”

The 3rd place winner received a prize of 2,000 euros and was awarded to the work “Arquivo Económico .pt” by Nuno Bragança.

The “Arquivo Económico .pt” organizes and presents information preserved by Arquivo.pt about the prices of products since the time of the Portuguese coin escudo.

As a result, we have a website that enables searching the price of consumer goods by different categories, such as supermarket, transportation or others, on given dates.

For example, users can easily know how much a trip from Lisbon-Porto or a cell phone call costed in 1999.

Honorable Mention granted by Público newspaper

Jornal Público, official partner of the 3rd edition of the Arquivo.pt Prize, awarded its Honorable Mention to the work “Jornal do Passado”, developed by Bruno Galhardo.

“Jornal do Passado” is a game for all ages, developed for Android, in which the users test their knowledge about news or events by guessing the date in which they occurred.

As a result, we have an app that enables searching the historical information preserved by Arquivo.pt in a pedagogical and fun way.

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