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2024 European and Portuguese elections in special Arquivo.pt collections

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European Elections

Last updated on October 9th, 2024 at 05:48 pm

Arquivo.pt made special collections on the three elections that took place this year: the Parlamentary elections on 10 March, the elections in Madeira island on 26 May and the European elections on 9 June.

More than 70,000 pages with content related to the elections and political life in Portugal and Europe were identified and around 4 terabytes of information collected.

We would like to thank the people who contributed to the selection of pages. Teachers and students are encouraged to do work using the special collections on elections that Arquivo.pt has produced over the years.

Find out more about the collection procedure and the results obtained.

Portuguese Parlamentary Elections (Legislativas 2024)

The Portuguese Parlamentary Elections  took place on 10 March 2024 to elect the members of the Assembly of the Republic for the 16th Legislature of the Third Portuguese Republic.

We would like to highlight the community’s contribution to this collection with a manual selection of 827 pages, which helped to improve the quality of the collection.

Around 500 compound terms or keywords were used to search for content published on the web about the elections. The service used for the automatic search was the Bing Search API. The results were limited to the top 20.

For example, the compound term ‘head-to-head legislative 2024’ found pages relating to debates between candidates. The term ‘legislative housing 2024’ found pages relating to party proposals for housing. The term ‘legislativas 2024 site:expresso.pt’ identified Expresso pages about the elections. The names of the candidates were also used.

After the elections, search terms specific to that period were used, such as ‘legislative victory 2024’, ‘legislative defeat 2024’ or ‘legislative results 2024’, among others.

The automatic search in the Bing Search API resulted in 34,120 addresses obtained before the elections and 5,803 after the elections.

The websites of political parties, including parties without parliamentary seats, were also collected during the election period.

Not all the content identified could actually be recorded, due to the limitations of the recording tools or the restrictions of the websites themselves.

The tools Heritrix, Brozzler and Browsertrix-cloud (beta version), courtesy of Webrecorder.net, were used for the recording.

The recording took place between 6 and 20 March and resulted in 3.2 Terabytes of information. The contents have been included in the EAWP45 special collection and will be available after one year.

To find out more, consult the open dataset:

Madeira Legislative Assembly elections 2024

The elections for the Legislative Assembly of Madeira took place on 26 May. Arquivo.pt carried out a special collection of content published on the web.

We began by automatically searching for news, election pages and websites related to the elections in Madeira. We used a list of search terms to put into the Bing Search API.

The aim was to obtain as many URLs as possible related to the event or topic in question, i.e. the Madeiran elections. To do this, several limits were set for the results: top 10, top20, top50 and top100. This process was documented, which shows that the more we expand the number of results, the greater the number of pages that are not very relevant and sometimes outside the intended target.

All the addresses (12,656) were recorded on 7 June in the Heritrix crawler.

Find out more by consulting the open dataset:

European elections 2024 in multilingual collection

The European elections took place on 9 June in Portugal. In some countries, such as Estonia, Czechia and Italy, the elections were held on a different date.

Arquivo.pt collected pages relating to the European Elections in the 27 countries of the European Union and in the 24 official languages.

The same methodology was used for the 2019 European Elections collection, i.e. a multilingual and semi-automatic search.

A list of 40 compound terms or keywords was used and translated into the 24 official EU languages. The terms were translated into the various languages in 2019 by the EU Publications Office. This resulted in a multilingual list of 960 terms to put into the Bing Search API.

Before the elections, on 3 June, the first search was carried out, resulting in 8,986 unique addresses, limiting the number of results to the top 20.

After the elections, new search terms were added with the names of the main candidates for the European Parliament in each country of the European Union. This second post-election search yielded 15,371 unique addresses.

The tool used for this collection was Heritrix. The collection was limited to three ‘hops’. In this case, the crawler follows links up to three times. This means that we opted for a certain restraint in the depth of the recording. Three ‘hops’ in the Heritrix crawler is enough to record one page (in other applications also called ‘page’ or ‘single page’ recording).

The content was recorded between 7 and 20 June and included in the EAWP46 special collection. It will be available after 1 year.

Find out more by consulting the open dataset:

Know more about past collections about elections

On line Cafe with Arquivo.pt continues

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Last updated on August 6th, 2024 at 02:11 pm

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Welcome to the third season of the Online Cafe with Arquivo.pt

Talk directly to the Arquivo.pt team and get answers to all your questions! The Arquivo.pt launched a new cycle of team chats with you through online sessions. Brief introductory presentations will be given, leaving time to ask all your questions about how to get more out of Arquivo.pt or how to apply to the Arquivo.pt Awards.

Sessions

February 17, 2022 – Primeiras páginas de jornais online portugueses

“Primeiras páginas de jornais online portugueses” (Front pages of Portuguese online newspapers) presents an interactive graphical analysis of the front pages of Portuguese online newspapers. For this study, specific items within the newspaper design were analysed, thus allowing trends to be observed over time.

Susana Parreira, explains how she developed this work as part of her Masters, with the collaboration and guidance of Ana Boavida (Universidade de Coimbra) Ana Sabino (Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco) and Penousal Machado (Universidade de Coimbra).

22nd session –  January 20, 2022 – Politiquices

Politiquices.pt, allows to research support or opposition relations between political personalities and parties expressed in news headlines. This application uses information preserved in Arquivo.pt to create an ontology of relations. It uses Natural Language Processing technology. David Batista, 2nd place of Arquivo.pt Awards 2021, will explain how he developed his work and demonstrate the applications for researchers and citizens in general.

Special session – World Digital Preservation Day 2021 – Major minors project – november 5

In November, World Digital Preservation Day is broadly celebrated and, to mark this international initiative, Arquivo.pt held an online session open to the community. Special guests of this session were the winners of the Arquivo.pt Award 2021, Leandro Costa, Paulo Martins and José Carlos Ramalho.

Previous seasons

Presentation at the IIPC Web Archiving Conference 2022

Portuguese municipal elections 2021 preserved by Arquivo.pt

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thumbnail_eleicoes_autarquicas

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

Cross-lingual collection about the 2019 European Elections is available

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print_europeanelections_q

Last updated on August 30th, 2022 at 10:46 am

Print European Elections 2019
Print from an archived page on Arquivo.pt: https://www.european-elections.eu

The special collection of web pages about the 2019 European Elections is available for search at Arquivo.pt.

To compile this collection, pages written in 24 European languages ​​were identified through automatic searches on the Bing search engine and suggestions from 17 European countries.

We emphasize the collaboration of the Publications Office of the European Union, which reviewed the list of search terms in the different languages ​​of the European Union.

Between May and July 2019, Arquivo.pt exhaustively collected pages related to the European Elections in several countries.

The resulting collection named “European Elections 2019” comprises 99 million web files that sum 4.8 Terabytes of information.

The technical report “A transnational crawl of the European Parliamentary Elections 2019 ” details the applied methodology. This methodology has been applied to generate other thematic collections such as about Covid-19.

We invited all citizens, especially the researchers, to try this service especially created to search the 2019 European Elections cross-lingual and international collection: https://arquivo.pt/ee2019

Video “A transnational and cross-lingual crawl of the European Parliamentary Elections 2019”

A transnational and cross-lingual crawl of the European Parliamentary Elections 2019, Ivo Branco, IIPC Web Archiving Conference and RESAW 2021 (slides)

To know more:

We preserved the Portuguese Local Elections of 2017

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Last updated on August 5th, 2024 at 05:05 pm

Arquivo.pt performed 2 web crawls of information related with the Portuguese Local Elections of 2017.

We appealed the community to contribute with suggestions of relevant Web pages so that we could preserve them.

The 2 crawls occurred during and after the campaign period, using the list of 410 Web pages suggested by the community and 13 887 web pages found automatically using search engines.

The manual identification process originated a list of 337 addresses which documented candidacies for the 2017 Municipal Elections. Note that 46% of these addresses referenced the social media platform Facebook.com. Much of this content of national interest could not be preserved because this foreign private company does not allow it.

The final result was an archive of 2 265 887 Web resources (360 GB).

Among the preserved web pages are the official sites of the candidates, news, blogs and articles with personal opinions about the elections.

The Arquivo.pt respects an embargo period of 1 year, and for that reason this collection will only be available by the end of 2018.

Meanwhile, you can consult the preserved pages about the previous elections of 2013, such as:

We would like to thank all the volunteers that collaborated with this initiative.

2017 Local Elections: We Need Your Help!

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Last updated on August 4th, 2024 at 05:55 pm

We have been emphasizing during our presentations that Arquivo.pt requires YOUR collaboration to preserve information published on the Web related to Elections.

Campaign websites are historically relevant. However, they are difficult to identify because they appear and disappear quickly. Moreover, they are often exclusively referenced through printed media (e.g. posters).

That’s why your collaboration is essential!

To help, simply add addresses of pages or sites related to the Municipal Elections of 2017 through the following link:

Suggesting only 1 address related to your location will make a valuable contribution.

Can you help?

If you have any questions, please contact us.

We archived the Web pages of the Portuguese Parliamentary Elections of 2015!

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Last updated on August 4th, 2024 at 05:58 pm

The Arquivo.pt made 4 crawls of Web pages related with the Portuguese Parliamentary Elections of 2015.

We had appealed to the community contribution by suggesting Web pages related with the Parliamentary Elections of 2015 in order to archive it.

We made 4 crawls, during and after the election campaign period, using the list of 127 Web pages suggested by the community, archiving a total of 2 802 407 Web resources, that occupy 274 GB.

It were collected Web pages such as the ones from the running political parties, news in the media about the elections, blogs, opinion articles, and satirical political Web pages.

The Arquivo.pt respects an embargo period of 1 year, and for that reason the archived collection will only be avaliable by the end of 2016.

However you can consult now some archived Web pages from the previous Portuguese Parliamentary Elections such as:

We would like to thank all the volunteers that helped with this initiative.
Now we need your collaboration suggesting Web pages about the Portuguese Presidencial Elections.
Can we count on you?