Winners of the Arquivo.pt Award 2022

The winners of the 2022 Arquivo.pt Award were announced last July. Each year, the Call recognize three projects in any field that use the information available on Arquivo.pt to develop practical applications and/or innovative research. In this 5th edition, 22 applications were received, and in addition to the three usual prizes, there was also an Honorable Mention awarded by the Público newspaper.

This year's first prize, worth €10,000, was awarded to Tiago Santos for his project Arquivo do Parlamento (Parliament Archive), a website that aggregates news and opinion articles on the activities of Parliament, its legislatures, parliamentary groups, and members of parliament, using web pages archived by Arquivo.pt and open data from Parlamento.pt. The goal, as described by its creator, is to make information easily available and combat misinformation, functioning as a search engine that seeks to identify and map the discourse produced about Portuguese political life and its protagonists.

Alina Yanchuk, Alina Trifan, Olga Fajarda, and José Luís Oliveira won second prize, worth €3,000, for their work Automatic classification of stigmatizing articles on mental illness, in which they developed a methodology for the automatic classification, using artificial intelligence, of stigmatizing articles on mental illness published in Portuguese online newspapers, allowing them to identify which newspapers most often use mental illness in a metaphorical sense, how they use it, and how this use has changed over time.

The third prize, worth €2,000, and this year's Honorable Mention were awarded to Diogo Correia and Ricardo Campos for their work Arquivo Público, a platform that allows users to search for information on any subject, personality, entity, among others, that has been covered by the Público newspaper in its online version between 2010 and 2021, and also provides access to more in-depth data analysis.

The jury for this 5th edition was composed of Gustavo Cardoso, professor of Communication Sciences at the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE); João Palmeiro, president of the Portuguese Press Association (API); Sara Carras, member of the board of directors of the Agency for Administrative Modernization; and Teresa Firmino, editor of the Science section of the Público newspaper, the official communication partner of this Call.

The Arquivo.pt Award is promoted annually by FCT with the aim of highlighting the importance of Arquivo.pt as a public service, in that, since 1996, it has preserved information published on the Portuguese web by collecting, storing, and processing it to make it accessible and searchable free of charge and with open access. This platform thus allows inactive websites to be recovered and made accessible again. For example, Arquivo.pt recently "saved" almost 200 million web files documenting research and development projects funded by the European Horizon 2020 program, which would otherwise have been lost.