On Tuesday 21 November 2023 I was a speaker at the conference Towards a Spanish Civil War and Francoist Repression Digital Research Infrastructure, organised by the Centre for Studies on Dictatorships and Democracies (CEDID), a study and research centre of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), made up of more than a hundred researchers from different disciplines. The conference was held at the UAB in Barcelona.
CEDID organised this conference in collaboration with the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UAB, the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Arkansas State University (ASU). Here you can see the programme. The video sessions have now been made available. Ours is here.
A great aspect of the congress, apart from the wonderful organization by Ana M. Alarcón-Jiménez (UAB), Victor Aparicio Rodríguez (UAB), Andrea Davis (ASU) and Wendy Perla Kurtz (UCLA), was that it culminated with the presentation of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) by Katharina Freise, and with the formation of a working group with the medium to long term objective of promoting an infrastructure similar to the EHRI, i.e. a global framework to access and map archives, universities and civil society initiatives to facilitate research on the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship.
Throughout these years several members of ihr.world have participated in congresses, often to present the projects of the association and to defend access to information and documentation. Here is a selection. You can see other activities here.
In 2023 Jesús Montilla participated in the international congress Refuge and Exile in Athens, organized by the Helenic Open University and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (April 24-26).
In 2022, I participated in the VII International Congress on Transparency and Open Government in Cartagena [min 1:15:00] (September 28) and, together with Carlos Terraga, in the IV International Colloquium on Political Violence in the 20th Century. [min 1:14:04] (June 17)
In 2021, I presented a paper at the Congress of the Contemporary History Association, Workshop 28: Archives, documents and digital sources of History: Tools, methods and research techniques. It was held in Cordoba and recently, the proceedings have been published, which you can see in full here, and my paper below:
In 2020 Martin Virtel participated in the Laboratori d’Arxius Municipals de Barcelona (LAM2020) with the paper Beyond digitization: data visualization (20 November).
In 2019 we participated in the round table of the axis legal and social repair at the XVIIè Congrés d’Arxivística i Gestió de Documents de Catalunya. L’arxiu social: de servei a comunitat. Sant Feliu de Guíxols [Video -minutes 0:38 to 1:01] (May 9), and in 2018, at the round table The social agents: the contribution of public institutions and foundations to the digital society, at the International Colloquium Traumatic Pasts. History and Collective Memory in the Digital Society (26 October). There we coincided with Matilde Eiroa, Principal Researcher of the HISMEDI project of Digital Humanities, who has also been a speaker at this last conference.
In addition, since the existence of the association Innovation and Human Rights, we have advocated for interdisciplinarity and contact with civil organizations, especially those related to the promotion of access to information. For this reason, we belong to the Coalición ProAcceso and we created a page on the right of access to information.
Also, we consider it important to seek common ground with professionals who do great work to promote access to documentation. We have an agreement with the very active Associació de Professionals de l’Arxivística i la Gestió de Documents de Catalunya, and contact with others, especially the Asociación Archiveros Castilla y León, (ACAL) and Asociación de Archiveros del Principado de Asturias (AAPA), as well as Archivists without Borders (ASF).
It has been a great event to have been at the conference Towards a digital infrastructure for research on the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s repression surrounded by so many people with great projects and capabilities. We are looking forward to playing an active role in the working group that has been formed to promote a global framework for access and mapping archives, universities and civil society initiatives to facilitate research on the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, and we hope that many other actors will join this ship that has just started to sail.
PHOTO: Screenshot of the congress.