Winners of the Arquivo.pt Prize 2022

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

The 1st prize this year, worth 10.000€, was awarded to Tiago Santos, for the Arquivo do Parlamento project, a website that aggregates news and opinion articles about the activity of the Parliament, its legislatures, parliamentary groups and members, using web pages archived by Arquivo.pt and the open data of Parliament.pt. The goal, as described by its creator, is to make information available in an easy way and to combat misinformation, working as a search engine that seeks to identify and map the discourses produced about Portuguese political life and its protagonists.

Alina Yanchuk, Alina Trifan, Olga Fajarda and José Luís Oliveira won the 2nd prize, corresponding to the amount of 3.000€, with the work Automatic classification of stigmatizing articles of mental illness, in which they developed a methodology for the automatic classification, with the use of artificial intelligence, of stigmatizing articles of mental illness published in Portuguese online newspapers, allowing the identification of which newspapers use more mental illness in a metaphorical sense, how they use it, and how this use has changed over time.

The 3rd prize, worth 2.000€, and this year's Honorable Mention were awarded to Diogo Correia and Ricardo Campos for their work Arquivo Público (Public Archive), a platform that allows the search for information on any subject, personality, entity, among others, that has been the subject of news coverage by the online version of the Público newspaper between 2010 and 2021, and also allows access to deeper data analysis.

The jury for this 5th edition was composed of Gustavo Cardoso, professor of Communication Sciences at the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE); João Palmeiro, president of the Portuguese Press Association (API); Sara Carras, member of the board 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 Prize is promoted annually by FCT with the aim of highlighting the importance of Arquivo.pt as a public service, in that, since 1996, it preserves the information published on the Portuguese web through its collection, storage and processing to make it accessible and searchable for free in open access. This platform makes it possible to recover inactive websites in order to make them accessible again. As an example, recently Arquivo.pt "saved" almost 200 million web files documenting research and development projects funded by the European Horizon 2020 program, which would otherwise be lost.