| EDITORIAL |
The impact that the spread of IT technologies and IT networks has had on historiography and social sciences is notable in the academic and research world. History, individual and collective memories and new cultural formats in which they present themselves on the net create a new panorama where it is possible to find transmedia narrative built from a set of digitised sources and digital-born sources. This liquid space, paraphrasing Zygmunt Bauman, must be approached with a cross-sectional methodology that combines innovative historiographical techniques with those used in similar disciplines in order to understand and interpret with new heuristic resources the virtual footprint that digital culture praxis is leaving in our current societies.
With this purpose, we present a dossier where we examine those aspects from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together History, Communication and Computing. In the articles we will observe the use of methodological practices scarcely known and their application in unconventional subjects of study, related to the possibilities offered by the Internet and, namely, by the Web 2.0.
The paper Fuentes digitales: el análisis de la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica en España en la red social Twitter [Digital sources: a case study of the analysis of the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain on the social network Twitter] by Maria Luz Congosto, focuses on the huge amount of information that can be obtained from social media by applying original IT techniques to research content. The paper uses quantitative methodologies to analyse Twitter and the most relevant communities that offer information on a specific topic, the profiles and the role played by their participants. The methodology proposed by the author, called t-hoarder, applied to the history recovery process and the memories of the Civil War and Franco’s regime, is used as an example of those new tools for research purposes.
Along the line of analysing digital-born resources, Matilde Eiroa’s paper entitled Fuentes primarias para una historia nacida digital: la blogosfera hispana de la Guerra Civil y el franquismo [Primary sources for a digital-born history: the Hispanic blogosphere on the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s regime], provides a proposal on the use of those new sources for historiography. After a theoretical analysis of blog formats, methodological guidelines are outlined using the digital collection Blogosphere of History and Memory of the HISMEDI project’s database (http://uc3m.libguides.com/hismedi). In her opinion, digital resources provide valuable information on the history and culture of the network communities that must be encompassed in the set of historiographical sources and evidences of our recent past. This collection of blogs unveils the authorship, content and characteristics of those resources, focused on the period 1936-1975.
Facebook is another platform widely used currently. Óscar Coromina and Adrián Padilla’s essay entitled Reconstruyendo las narrativas de la memoria en Facebook con Métodos Digitales [Reconstructing memory narratives on Facebook with Digital Methods], goes deep into collective accounts created by the participation of users that comment and provide content to posts uploaded on the pages of this social network. The Netvizz tool, made available by Facebook, is used to analyse content and disseminated messages. The essay applies this tool to the representation of Civil War and Francoism’s pages as a way to ascertain generation, transmission and representation processes of a traumatic past. According to the authors, Netvizz provides an opportunity to know the mediation of cultural and historic phenomena.
In the framework of digital humanities, in their paper entitled Cultura jurisdiccional y digitalización de la memoria del “gobierno de justicia.”Modelado de datos y enfoque digital para la historia del derecho de Iberoamérica [Jurisdictional culture and memory digitization of the “Government of Justice.” Data Modeling and Digital Approach for the Legal History of Ibero-America, Victor Gayol and Jairo Antonio Melo analyse the reconstruction of a cultural context from a hermeneutics of texts closely read that has made it possible to show the dialogue between diverse legislations drafted throughout centuries. Using as an example a Hispanic-Indian body of law, they propose digital processing methods that generate new insights and interpretations based on the use of specific programming tools.
Internationalisation and the possibility of the global dissemination of processes and research results is one of the most outstanding advantages offered by the use of the Internet. The dossier includes a specific example of international collaboration and the Web 2.0 concept, that is, the interaction, connection and participation with the article by Jordi Guixé entitled Memorias Europeas digitales en la era transnacional. Algunas referencias desde el Observatorio Europeo de Memorias [European Digital memories in a transnational era. The references from the European Observatory on Memories]. He investigates the transmission of memory of the last decade in a European framework of policies and memory projects. We can observe the structural concept of dissemination on the EUROM website of this political, social and historiographical issue. The author explains the criteria used to select content, his goals and the digital and technological tools that have turned it into a reality and its success, in terms of being followed by many international institutions and research teams.
Analogue sources digitised by institutions, as well as the possibilities offered by social media to recover censored history, are the study subject of Raúl Magallón. In his paper entitled Las encuestas prohibidas de la transición española. El acceso a la información pública y la Historia Digital [The forbidden opinion polls of the Spanish Transition. Access to public information and Digital History] he includes six surveys - perfectly documented and censored at the time - asking Spaniards about their preferences regarding the best governance system for Spain. An unpublished interview carried out by journalist Victoria Prego to Adolfo Suarez in 1995 and broadcast 21 years later in TV program La Sexta Columna turned the broadcast into a trending topic and generated, nearly simultaneously, numerous newspaper articles in the press.
With these studies we aim to show the need to update historiographical research and to offer an overview of the possibilities offered by new technological tools, both for the analysis of digital societies’ contexts and for analogue sources digitised by archives and institutions.
This dossier is sponsored by the project Historia y Memoria Histórica online. Retos y oportunidades para el conocimiento del pasado en Internet [History and online Historical memory. Challenges and opportunities for the knowledge of the past on the Internet] (HISMEDI), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) with reference HAR-2015-63582-P MINECO/FEDER (http://uc3m.libguides.com/hismedi).
Matilde Eiroa
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
e-mail:meiroa@hum.uc3m.es
ORCID iD: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0130-5909
https://uc3m.academia.edu/MatildeEiroaSanFrancisco
Raúl Magallón
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
e-mail: rmagallo@hum.uc3m.es
ORCID iD: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2236-7802
https://uc3m.academia.edu/RaulMagall%C3%B3nRosa