Methodology
Interrogating the Archive
A methodology for using AI to review an entire newspaper archive —27 years of elPeriódico de Guatemala—, presented at the 19th Ibero-American Journalism Colloquium.
- Role
- Author and speaker
- Period
- 2026
- With
- 19.º Coloquio Iberoamericano de Periodismo
The problem
Anyone could open elPeriódico’s PDFs and read a story. Comparing all of them, year by year, took a team of journalists and programmers, a lot of money and a lot of time.
What I did
- Making the archive measurable: OCR for the years on paper, text extraction for the digital ones, and full-text search end to end.
- Tools written with AI, in Claude Code, to read, sort and cross-check the archive against official records. Every question is written down and can be run again.
- A person checks by hand what the machine concludes, and the method’s rules live in a public text file: which source outweighs which, an evidence scale, and what must never be inferred.
The result
The goal is to package the method as a toolkit —an AI plugin— so journalists and researchers can explore el_Archivo efficiently. It is still in development.