Rebuilding the Past: Reconstructing Portuguese News Outlets with Web Archives

Rodrigo Silva, Ricardo Campos

Abstract: Around 80% of websites change significantly or disappear altogether after the first year, resulting in the loss of invaluable information. In this volatile scenario, preserving online content is increasingly essential. This is especially critical for local news outlets, which produce a wealth of information within the unique context of their communities but often lack sufficient archiving resources. In this paper, we take a significant step forward by leveraging the information preserved by the Portuguese Web Archive, Arquivo.pt, to recreate the website of a local news outlet. This online demo grants users direct access to previously lost news articles, images, and front covers, thus contributing to preserving local digital heritage. An IR system was also implemented to ensure easy access, along with a recommendation system based on BERT embeddings to suggest related news articles and enhance user engagement. As a final contribution, we also provide a Python package, enabling others to replicate the process of collecting, processing, retrieving, and recreating websites for local news outlets in Portugal.

External IDs:doi:10.1007/978-3-031-88720-8_15