ProtoCollection
| Reference number | |
| Coordinator | JOURNALISM++ STOCKHOLM AB - Journalistm++ Stockholm |
| Funding from Vinnova | SEK 358 400 |
| Project duration | October 2014 - April 2015 |
| Status | Completed |
Purpose and goal
The purpose of the project was to build a tool for policy makers, researchers, journalists and others with an interest in municipality governance. By extracting machine readable text from municipality board minute meetings that are often published as scanned pdfs we have made thousands of documents publicly searchable and analyzable in a way that was previously impossible.
Results and expected effects
The site protokollen.net is the output of the project. The site consists of an interface for searching minute meetings by keyword, municipality and time range. Documents can be viewed on the site or downloaded from the original source. It is also possible to export document links from a list of search results. We have received a lot of interest for the project. At the journalism conference Grävseminariet in Jönköping we pre-launched the site. But as the text extraction is not - at the moment of writing - complete we are still awaiting our official launch.
Approach and implementation
The aim of the project was to gather all the minute meetings from all Swedish municipality boards from 2010 and onwards. The work consisted of three phases: 1) Document collection 2) Text extraction 3) Presentation and documentation. The collection was mostly done by scarping municipality websites. When documents were missing we had to manually gather them. Text extraction means making minute meetings searchable. A lot of the documents are published as scanned pdfs.