December 2020 • Natalia Mora
Working on the database this semester has been a continuation of Chloe’s summer work. We started the semester with Chloe catching us up on the work she had done, it was all done through Zoom screen-sharing tutorials. These tutorials were so that we could understand her process and ask questions. Chloe’s codification process was mostly straightforward, however, we agreed it would be best to create a workflow document for others who might work on or with the database. The workflow document was informed by the questions that had come up during Chloe’s tutorials. The next step is translating it into Spanish.
The codification focuses on gathering the data found within the case files about the victims. The data ranges from gender, group involvement, job, to religion. We’ve had a lot of questions come up as to how to categorize some instances of disappearance as the semester continues. We’ve started to add new categories and are aware that the cases which Chloe worked on this summer won’t have been looked at with these categories in mind. We hope to have enough time to go back to these if we can finish a first pass through the whole archive.
We’ve also continued using a spreadsheet created by Chloe over the summer that flags cases which show inconsistencies within the archive. We are taking note of things such as misspellings of names, incorrect date of disappearance, different names in cases, and many other things. Recently we’ve also encountered issues with the archive site which won’t load images which might require rescanning if the images aren’t found.
