eltokh7/shorouk-archive

Shorouk Archive

Dataset summary

Article-level text archive extracted from daily PDF issues of the Egyptian newspaper الشروق (Al‑Shorouk).

• Rows: 473,949 articles
• Date range: 2009-02-01 → 2025-11-03
• Language: Arabic (ar)
• File: shorouk_articles.parquet (Snappy-compressed Parquet, ~754 MB)

This dataset is machine-generated from the PDFs (LLM-assisted structuring). Expect OCR/text-layer noise and occasional article boundary errors.

Maintainer: Khaled Eltokhy (eltokh7)

Dataset structure

This repository contains a single Parquet table with these columns:

Column	Type	Description
date	string	Issue date (YYYY-MM-DD)
page	int32	Page number within the issue
source	string	Constant: الشروق
title	string	Article title/headline
author	string	Author name if present, else empty string
content	string	Full article body text
word_count	int32	Approximate word count (len(content.split()))

There are no predefined splits (single table).

How this dataset was created (PDF → Parquet)

This dataset was produced from a local pipeline (see the pipeline/ folder in the source project):

1. PDF → TXT: extract each PDF’s embedded text layer using PyMuPDF, writing --- Page N --- markers.
2. (Optional) PDF → layout JSON: detect layout blocks (titles/paragraphs/etc.) and their bounding boxes.
3. TXT(+layout) → per-page JSON: LLM-assisted conversion of each page into structured JSON with articles[] (title/author/content).
4. Per-page JSON → per-day JSON: merge all pages for a date into one daily JSON file.
5. Daily JSON → Parquet: flatten all articles into the Parquet table published here.

Usage

Pandas

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_parquet("shorouk_articles.parquet")

Hugging Face datasets

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("parquet", data_files="shorouk_articles.parquet")["train"]

DuckDB

SELECT date, COUNT(*) AS n_articles
FROM read_parquet('shorouk_articles.parquet')
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 1;

Known limitations / notes

• Parquet viewer limits: the hosted “Data Studio”/SQL viewer may fail on large scans depending on row-grouping. If you need the viewer to work reliably, re-export and re-upload the Parquet with smaller row groups.
• Quality: article boundaries and cleanup are machine-generated and may contain errors (merged/split articles, missing authors, residual OCR artifacts).
• Coverage: not every issue/page in the source archive is guaranteed to be present.

Licensing

This repository contains newspaper text. Please ensure you have the right to use and redistribute this content in your intended setting.

Citation

If you use this dataset, cite the Hugging Face dataset page and include the access date, for example:

@dataset{shorouk_archive,
  title        = {Shorouk Archive},
  author       = {Khaled Eltokhy},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/eltokh7/shorouk-archive}},
  year         = {2026}
}