The current crisis of violence in countries such as Colombia and Mexico has resulted in massive numbers of murders, forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, among other abuses. Colombia has the largest dataset of abuses in the history of human rights (more than 20 million raw records). For its part, Mexico is experiencing a crisis of disappearances (more than 130,000) highlighted by victims’ families, the UN, and the IACHR, but systematically denied by the government.

This seminar is dedicated to explore the intersection of digital methods, human rights investigations, and digital infrastructures for archiving, by departing from the needs of affective communities.

Against the context of the accumulation of massive records of such abuses, how do communities affected by these abuses respond? At least with the following claims:

- That the authorities locate their relatives and put an end to the structural dynamics that enable these abuses.

- That the validation of the experiences of victims, survivors, and their families not be reduced to the quantification of those experiences—that is, that they not be treated merely as numbers.

- That there be an effort to reclaim the everyday life lost or shattered by violence—that is, that the memories of victims, survivors, and their families become part of a collective memory that confronts violence.

From a digital methods perspective, the question might be: What can digital investigative approaches do to address these records in light of the aforementioned demands?

This seminar aims to explore alternative methodological infrastructures for the digitization of serious human rights violations. The goal is not to “test” quantitative methods or to try to find methodological errors in these approaches, but rather to chart a path from digital research that bridges the demands of civil society in contexts of violence crisis and research approaches to massive digital records of social experience.

Data samples for this approach might be the column of “description” in the database with over 58 thousand official records of confrontations between organized crime and military forces in Mexico from 20217 to 2020, hidden by two Mexican governments; the testimonial volume of the Colombian Truth Commission, comprised of over 200 testimonies of victims and survivors of the armed conflict, up to be processed in its entirety using corpus linguistic tools; or a transcription of any testimony of traumatic violence perpetrated by the state.

Methodologically, we draw on interdisciplinary insights. For example, elements drawn from sociolinguistics can be employed to follow guidelines for transcribing and analyzing both massive and particular records of violence as the ones already mentioned. Thus, silence and crying in testimonies can be understood from this discipline as fundamental syntactic units of enunciation, as the activation of non-symbolic sign channels, rather than as the suspension or mere absence of discourse. Carrying out this type of segmentation in testimonies can lead to mechanisms for processing, visualizing, and analyzing qualitative data through the use of network analysis and corpus linguistics tools, to generate networks of silence or crying that complement traditional semantic analyses. In addition to this, everyday life enunciations within the structure of hundreds of testimonies, such as mentions of “my mom,” “my dad,” or “at” (to refer to specific times of day) can lead to the development and refinement of visualization and analysis tools using NLP and corpus linguistics techniques aside the "empty words" filters, and also lead to the identification and classification of fragments of everyday life shattered by the violence suffered by these individuals, and to the potential reclaims of such everyday life. Finally, explorations of discursive patterns in government descriptions of massive confrontations with organized crime cells can reveal in which ways the government is reinforcing the deployment of violence through discursive framing, but also how might these records contain syntactic and semantic elements that escape from the institutional calculations that produce them; using corpus linguistics and network analysis tools such findings can lead to the design of critical data visualizations.

This discussion is part of the development of digital methods that encourage the critical appropriation of data management tools developed from quantitative approaches, as well as the creation of data visualizations designed to generate open interpretations and partial understanding of the experience they capture. 

In the first part of seminar, Victor Hugo Ábrego Molina will introduce the approaches to the victims and survivors testimonies with time for discussion. After the break, he will give a short presentation of the approach to the governmental records of violence, and how a type of critical datafication can process, visualize and analyze such records.

Registration is not required but please confirm if you’d like to attend via: Lonneke van der Velden ( L.C.vanderVelden@uva.nl ).

About the speaker

Victor Hugo Ábrego Molina is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociocultural Studies at ITESO, Mexico, Victor Hugo Ábrego is also part of the research team at Signa_Lab, a laboratory for technological innovation and applied interdisciplinary studies. He is a doctoral candidate in Communication, Languages, and Information at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia). His doctoral research develops an approach to digital flows of information and communication about serious human rights violations in Mexico and Colombia. He has taught courses as a visiting lecturer at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Mexico), Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (El Salvador), and at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Cali (Colombia).  

Suggested background readings:                                 

Ábrego Molina, V. H. (Preprint). Datafication Infrastructures. Reference Approaches and Methodological Discussions for Studying Digital Records of Serious Human Rights Violations.

Acosta López, M. (2023b). Grammars of Listening: or on the Difficulty of Rendering Trauma Audible. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 93, 153-170. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246123000048

Franco Migues, D. (2019). Technologies of hope. Technopolitical Appropriations in the Search

for Missing Persons in Mexico. The case of Las Rastreadoras del Fuerte Tecnologías de esperanza. Apropiaciones tecnopolíticas para la búsqueda de personas desaparecidas en México. El caso de Las Rastreadoras del Fuerte. Comunicación y Sociedad, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.32870/cys.v2019i0.7280              

Reguillo, R. (2023). Essays on the abyss: politics of the gaze, violence, technopolitics. Encartes. Vol 6. 11. https://encartes.mx/en/reguillo-regimenes-de-visibilidad-violencias-tecnopoliticas-imaginacion-metodologica/