Portuguese municipal elections 2021 preserved by Arquivo.pt

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Last updated on May 8th, 2023 at 05:09 pm

Thousands of pages about the elections to preserve before they disappear

On 26 September 2021 the local elections were held in Portugal, an event marked by the Covid-19 pandemic. The communication of the candidates was mainly based on the media and publications through the Web.

Electoral websites are of manifest historical importance. However, they are difficult to identify because they appear and disappear quickly. In the case of municipal elections, the number of candidates and the variety of channels used makes the task even more challenging.

Arquivo.pt, as in previous elections, launched a special collection to preserve contents concerning the municipal elections.

How was the electoral content published on the Web identified

The first step was the manual identification of election-related content by municipality and parish. For this purpose help was requested from people and organisations with the following initiatives:

  • collaborative list “Municipal Elections 2021: we need your help!
  • request for collaboration from the archive services of the 308 municipalities in the identification of electoral sites and candidates of the respective municipality;
  • request to the Parties to send the names of their lead candidates.

The Eyedata – Social Data Lab site was used, which made the names of candidates from all over the country available on the Web.  The Wikipedia page Eleições autárquicas portuguesas de 2021 was also used as a source of information.

This manual identification process resulted in a list of 255 addresses which documented the candidacies for the 2021 Municipal Elections. Notice that 61% of the identified addresses pointed to private social media platforms: 54% facebook.com, 5% instagram.com and 2% twitter.com).

Much of this content of national interest could not be preserved because these foreign private companies do not allow it.

The list with names of candidates by county, party or coalition was used to create automatic searches in Bing that identified the most relevant electoral contents.

For instance, by combining the term “autárquicas 2021” with the name of a candidate and the respective municipality, one obtains results related to that candidate, such as news, initiatives of his/her campaign or the official page of his/her electoral campaign.

This methodology was applied in the Presidential Elections 2021 and in the Europeia Elections 2019. The technical report A transnational crawl of the European Parliamentary Elections 2019 details the applied methodology.

Content collection and availability in Arquivo.pt

Between 22nd August and 8th October 2021, the Arquivo.pt gathered, in an exhaustive manner, pages related to the Local Government Elections 2021.

The resulting collection called Municipal Elections 2021″ (EAWP39) gathers 31 million files that total 2.7 TeraBytes of information and will be available one year later.

Researchers who want to make a study on the 2021 Local Elections and need early access to the collected contents can contact Arquivo.pt.

To know more

Memory of events and festivals of art: PARA SEMPRE

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Last updated on February 8th, 2022 at 10:57 am

The exhibition Memória de festivais e eventos de arte proposes a look at the Portuguese art scene present on the Web and includes a chronology of these events.

This online information product is a presentation of the results in a systematic and structured way of the PARA SEMPRE project.

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Online exhibition – arteparasempre.wordpress.com

The project’s second online product will be a directory of references of artists, galleries and projects in the area of contemporary Portuguese art to be made available during 2022, at the Gulbenkian Art Library webpage.

Cycle of Webinars “Art forever on the web”

A cycle of Webinars entitled “Art forever on the web” was held, between April and July 2021, oriented to artists, curators, gallerists and event producers, among others.

The average number of participants was 58 per session, who evaluated their satisfaction, on a scale from 1 to 5, with an average score of 4.6. The three sessions aimed at disseminating knowledge about digital preservation of information on the web and requirements for publishing preservable information.

Identification of artists, galleries and projects

The first step was to identify relevant artists, galleries and projects in the contemporary Portuguese art scene. We started from an initial set of 63 agents (artists, galleries and projects), to which 573 artists belonging to the Modern Collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the BAA – FCG Collection of Artist Books and Independent Publishing were added.

Throughout these months, 636 elements were thus identified (social networks and websites active in 2020), which were subsequently analysed.

The conclusions of the analysis carried out within the project were presented in the last webinar, held on July 1, 2021 :

Special feature on art websites and blogs

In April 2021, Arquivo.pt made a special collection based on the initial identification of artists, galleries and projects and obtained 2.8 terabytes of preserved information.

New contents about art websites were recorded, using tools that allow higher quality collections, such as Brozzler and Webrecorder.

A collaborative project of digital curation

“PARA SEMPRE” (forever) is a digital curatorial project applied to the information made available on the web by the several agents of the contemporary Portuguese art scene (artists, galleries and hybrid sites).

Its main purpose is to contribute to the preservation/reuse of past and future pages, to ensure the preservation of the digital memory of current Portuguese art available at Arquivo.pt, and to promote knowledge on this theme by presenting it in a systematized and structured way.

Its creation results from the encounter of the missions of two organizations: one that aims to ensure the preservation of the Portuguese web, Arquivo.pt, and another that assumes itself as an agent in the development of knowledge about contemporary Portuguese art, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Art Library. This is part of the ROSSIO (Research Infrastructure in the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities).

Training in colaboration with the City Council of Lisboa

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Last updated on December 13th, 2021 at 12:02 pm

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A cycle of webinars was held between October and December 2021, organised by the Department of Development and Training of the Municipality of Lisbon, within the digital skills program Passaporte Competências DigitaisCâmara Municipal de Lisboa, in collaboration with Centro Qualifica +ValorLx, a Infraestrutura ROSSIO and Arquivo.pt Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia I.P.

The aim of this initiative was to present the services of Arquivo.pt and disseminate their use so that the historical heritage published on the web can be preserved and exploited by any citizen.

The sessions were open by registration and had a total of 126 participants (average of 31 per session).

The speakers’ presentations were recorded and can now be accessed, along with the slides from each session.

Sessions held

September 15 – Arquivo.pt. What is it? What is it for?

Daniel Gomes, manager of Arquivo.pt, the public Web preservation service operated by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., explains how any citizen can use to consult Web pages from the past in the most diverse cases and talks about the importance of preserving the digital memory.

November 11 – API Arquivo.pt : automatic acess to the Web preserved information

Vasco Rato, web developer of Arquivo.pt, presented the Arquivo.pt’s APIs (Application Programming Interface). These enable the development of innovative and useful applications for organizations through the automatic processing of historical information preserved from the Web.

November 25 – Archive the Web: do-it-yourself!

Ricardo Basílio, curador digital do Arquivo.pt, apresentou um tutorial sobre a utilização das ferramentas do Webrecorder.net para gravação de páginas Web em formato normalizado no próprio computador, a qual permite que uma pessoa ou uma organização possa organizar em pequena escala o seu próprio arquivo da Web.

December 9 – Publish on the Web: best practices  by Arquivo.pt

Pedro Gomes, the engineer responsible for the Arquivo.pt crawls, addressed the issue of publishing preservable web contents. How many contents are in formats that make their future access difficult or impossible? These situations were illustrated with practical cases and recommendations on how to avoid them. Therefore, it all boils down to publishing well in order to preserve well.

Know more about Arquivo.pt training

Arquivo.pt is open to collaborations aiming at training professionals in organizations or common citizens on Web preservation.

Learn about the training modules and contact us.