Month: October 2020

Metadata is a crucial element of an archival digitization project. It forms the bridges that join together the thousands of scanned images that form an archive; metadata is also an opportunity to make visible connections between individual files contained within the archive in a way that is impossible without computation. It hence also allows us to visualize the data within the archive, transforming a collection of individual cases into a unique and pluralistic dataset that can be analyzed by researchers…

This summer, I continued a process of database codification with the archive that I started last year to produce a demographic analysis of who is in the archive. This process involved opening each case in the archive and recording demographic information about who was disappeared, such as their gender, occupation, religion, and political affiliation…

Working on the database codification has been quite frustrating: from the monotony of ctrl+f down to combing through the archive itself to find information that isn’t obvious from the case descriptions within the database…

The Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM) Digital Archive is a project that aims to digitize, preserve, and provide access to over 3,700 case files of disappearances tied to Guatemala’s armed internal conflict (1960-1996). Our last public update introduced the partnership between Haverford College Libraries and the GAM and described our initial success in piloting scanning and description workflows…

Throughout history, the United States government has often found itself involved in wars outside of its own borders, especially those during the Cold War in Latin America. Such was the case during Guatemala’s armed conflict…

This summer I focused on the violence in Rabinal, a municipality in the department of Baja Verapaz, during the internal armed conflict in Guatemala. Specifically, I focused on what the content and production of the GAM’s intake forms in the disappearances collection can tell us about the complexities of violence in Rabinal…

Two weeks into our nine week summer partnership with the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo, we have begun to delve into the Disappeared archive held at the GAM office in Guatemala City. We are in a unique position as the first undergraduate scholars to be conducting research based on this archive. Our partner organization, the GAM, has entrusted us with the mission of telling stories using documents from this collection in hopes of continuing the work of building historical memory in Guatemala…

In the post, Hannah Alpert-Abrams and Alex Galarza describe how they have understood their roles in collaborative projects with Guatemalan partner organizations seeking justice for human rights violations committed during the country’s civil war (1960-1996). Both are CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellows in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies whose projects focus on post-custodial archives in Guatemala City.

My name is Rosemary Cohen, and I’m a senior history major at Haverford. I got involved with the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo project because I am a research assistant for Brie Gettleson, a research and instruction librarian at Magill Library, and Brie is a key part of the GAM project…