Public participation to recover and communicate the memory of the Spanish republican exile through Digital Public History and Open Data: the e-xiliad@s project

Bocanegra Barbecho, Lidia; Universidad de Granada

Public participation to recover and communicate the memory of the Spanish republican exile through Digital Public History and Open Data: the e-xiliad@s project

Bocanegra Barbecho, Lidia

Published: 2019
Publisher: Universidad de Granada
Repository: digibug.ugr.es
Language: en

Abstract

The Spanish republican exile was the result of the Republican defeat in 1939 by the Francoist army, led by the general Francisco Franco. Nearly half a million-people had to go into mass exile during the months of January and February, through the French border crossings. Many other exiles did so, months later, from Alicante to the North African coasts. These places of destination were, in most cases, places of passage to successive destination countries in Europe and, especially, in Latin America. The international nature of this historical event means that there is currently a large number of personal files scattered in different places around the world. In order to recover these stories, the e-xiliad@ project was conceived in 2009, with a Digital Humanities and Public History perspective: www.exiliadosrepublicanos.info. It is an e-project that, through a multilanguage digital platform, retrieves unpublished documents about the anonymous exiled. From the research point of view, the privileged target audience is composed by relatives and friends of the exiles and those interested in the subject. This initiative funded twice (2009 and 2011) by the General Directorate of Migrations of the Spanish Ministry of Employment and Social Security, uses a methodology of obtaining data based on public participation from citizen science. That is, the content is generated on-line by the public at an international level, coordinated by a scientific specialist. For almost a decade, the project has been developing an online public engagement strategy for public participation based on open data, supported by a custom digital platform and its digital social networks, with more than a thousand followers. At this stage, the project recovered about five hundred unpublished archives among photographs, memories, official documents, letters and interviews, that comes associated with about two hundred completed exile records. The vast majority of these data are public, thanks to the informed consent of the author. E-xiliad@s, being an initiative that recovers the memory of the anonymous republican exiled, also acts as a digital identity place for those connected to this topic and as a space that informs society, with scientific rigor, from the field of Digital Public History.

Full text

E-XILIAD@S PROJECT Public participation to recover and communicate the memory of the Spanish republican exile through Digital History and Open Data III National AIPH Conference, 24th to 28th of June 2019, Università degli Studi della Campania ~ Santa Maria Capua Vetere (Italy) Credits Scientific Publications E-xiliad@s is an interactive research project on the Spanish republican exile, financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Labour and Immigration in 2009 and by the Ministry of Employment and Social Security in 2011, through the Dirección General de Migraciones. The aim is to collect unpublished data, online, about the anonymous Spanish Republican exile, mainly for the period from 1939 to 1959 Franco regime, related to social, public and contemporary history and a strong focus on gender, hence the name “exiliad@s". by PhD. Lidia Bocanegra Barbecho - Digital Humanities specialist and HD responsible at Medialab UGR (Universidad de Granada) [email protected] | @Lidia_Bocanegra | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9479-5921 https://ugr.academia.edu/LidiaBocanegra | https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lidia_Bocanegra_Barbecho THE PROJECT AIM SPANISH HISTORICAL MEMORY RECOVERY WWW.EXILIADOSREPUBLICANOS.INFO CO-CREATION METHODOLOGY The unpublished data are provided by users who, after registration, compile a series of questions collected in a web form created ad hoc, called Ficha del exiliado in Spanish or Exile Record in English. It has a series of questions, mandatory or not, some of them with a free text field and others with closed lists. The questions respect a chronological order; the objective is to stimulate the family memory of those who fill it. THE COMMITMENT E-xiliad@s collaborates to recover the memory of the republican exile through Open Data, with the consent of the users; at the same time, it is responsible to communicate to the society, with scientific rigor, the topics of exile and return, through the methodology of Digital Public History. CITIZEN SCIENCE STRATEGY DIGITAL PUBLIC HISTORY Visibility - Multilingual project (Spanish / French / English). Countries of highest audience: Spain, France, Mexico, USA, Argentina, Great Britain, Chile, Colombia, Puerto Rico. For more than 10 years, the project appears in the top queries, in the topic of the Republican exile, in the main search engines. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - code without errors, internal metatags, URL, etc. Large amount of published content - creation of new Exile Records and new sections. Use of the project's social networks (Facebook and Twitter), with more than 1.3k followers, to generate and disseminate new content. Reciprocal exchange. Using the system "you give me, I offer you" helps to expand the project, generating greater confidence to new users that want to deposit their memory in it. How the system works? a) Collection of information through the internal web form (you give me); b) Services offered by the project (I offer you): publication of the information received in related sections, with prior consent; historical advice via email; bulletin board; dissemination of information through project social media; creation of informative sections about exile: biographies, geolocated map, biblio/webography, travelogues… User friendly Web layout - Easy-to-use and professional layout that incorporates ecommerce web design knowledge: positioning of information and images strategically, writing by paragraphs … E-XILIAD@S RESULTS Since 2010, e-xiliad@s has published approximately 200 records of anonymous exiles and compiled about 500 files among images, scanned official documents, old newspaper articles, memoirs, poems, sound documents (interviews). More than 80% of the records are public, which shows a wide availability of users internationally to share and recover the memory of republican exile. The project has more than 1300 followers in its social networks and nearly 45,000 visits to the project's website every year, becoming today one of the reference projects at academic and international level about the Republican exile. EXILE RECORDS TOTAL: 181 PUBLISHED: 81% UNPUBLISHED: 19% FILES TOTAL: 483 PUBLISHED: 69% UNPUBLISHED: 31% ANNOUNCEMENTS TOTAL: 65 COMMENTS: 64 IMAGE GALLERIES TOTAL: 21 WEB SECTIONS TOTAL: 89 WEB VISITS TOTAL: 462.810 USERS: 146.625 FOLLOWERS TOTAL: 1334 FACEBOOK: 871 TWITTER: 463 ACHIEVEMENTS - Co-creación, participación y redes sociales para hacer historia. Ciencia con y para la sociedad (2017)- DOI 10.5209/HICS.57847! - ‘Cada día atrasamos el reloj un cuarto de hora para llegar con la hora americana'. Diario de viaje hacia el exilio (2015) - DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1182943! - La web 2.0 y el estudio del exilio republicano español: el análisis de la movilidad social y el retorno a través del proyecto e-xiliad@s (2015) - DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1182456 ! - El exilio republicano español: estudio y recuperación de la memoria a través de la web 2.0. Nuevo enfoque metodológico con el proyecto e-xiliad@s (2015) - DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1182238! - El semanario Exilio y los intelectuales del campo de Bram, 1939 (2015) - DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1182305! - Revista Exilio. Campo de Bram (2015) - DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1182839! - Memoria, exilio republicano e historia digital: El Proyecto e-xiliad@s (2014) - DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1182357