August 2020 • Chloe Juriansz
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. This information was recorded in a spreadsheet that contained information about each case. Throughout this process, I also recorded potential problems that arose with the digital archive, including links that didn’t work, cases where different dates were listed than what was recorded on the carpeta, and variant duplicates. This information was recorded in the hopes that these problems could be addressed to make the digital archive more user friendly to both researchers and family members of the disappeared.
This process of database codification also led to a process of data visualization in which I attempted to graph correlations between gender, occupation, religion, and political affiliation in the department of Chimaltenango. I produced a series of graphs that did not make sense and came to the conclusion that it was not a matter of not understanding the data visualization tools but that the correlations that I thought existed in the data were not present. This realization led me to a process of calculating and recording demographic information by department in order to get a more accurate picture of what categories were present in the archive and to be able to communicate this information to other project team members and the GAM. To do this, I used OpenRefine to tabulate how many cases contained each demographic category and calculated the percentages per department and per the whole archive itself up until the point I had worked through. This information was recorded in a spreadsheet that can be updated as we move through the archive and can hopefully be used to produce interactive data visualizations of the demographic data per department.
My hope is to finish the database codification process for the entire archive and to hopefully produce some preliminary data visualizations for each category by department that can then be used by future compañeros to build upon the work I have done.