Ricardo Campos, researcher at INESC TEC and professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, together with Diogo Correia, was one of the winners of the Arquivo.pt Award. The duo won the third place and an honourable mention by the newspaper Público, thanks to the project Arquivo Público, a web interface focused on the contents published on the newspaper’s website over time, and preserved by Arquivo.pt.
Which locations are mentioned in the newspaper Público throughout the year? Which personalities and organisations are mentioned the most? In which municipalities were the words “Jornal Público” searched the most? How many pieces were published about Cristiano Ronaldo, between 2010 and 2021, on the first page of the digital edition of Público? The set of questions that Arquivo Público can address meet the research interests of each one, and comprehend various areas of national and international society, allowing to understand the coverage, in space and time, of a newspaper like Público, namely about topics that were the subject of news in the past
Ricardo Campos explained that the project focuses on two key goals. First, “the development of a research system that allows users to search any subject covered by the newspaper Público, between 2010 and 2021”. Second, “a method for the automatic analysis of the news from the newspaper, according to three dimensions: the entities that were mentioned the most, the relevant keywords and the location of the news in space and time”, he said.
In practical terms, the project allows each person to search and analyse a large amount of news from the past, something that the INESC TEC researcher considers “an important contribution, not only in terms of preserving the archive, but also concerning the dissemination of knowledge”.
More than 67000 news items were collected during the project – which, according to Ricardo Campos, demonstrates “the importance of data science nowadays, in the processing of significant volumes of information”.
Honoured with the award, the researcher ensures that the project was designed towards the application “to other media, guaranteeing them the possibility of creating their own news sub-archive”.
The Arquivo.pt Award aims to acknowledge innovative initiatives based on historical information preserved by this platform.
Ricardo Campos and Diogo Correia received the award for third place from the Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Elvira Fortunato, and the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Science and Technology, Madalena Alves. The honourable mention attributed by Público was granted to the editor of the newspaper’s Science section, Teresa Firmino.
The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with INESC TEC and the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar.
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