Calling death by its name: breaking the silence of Guatemala's National Police Archive

Quantitative analysis of historical 'big data' can help to explain how record-making practices around death facilitated policies of repression and control, writes Tamy Guberek (University of Michigan)

Human Rights and Technology: Mapping the Landscape to Support Grantmaking

This study was commissioned by five leading foundations to inform donors' thinking and funding in the overlapping space of human rights and technology.New technologies, especially access to the internet, are transforming the landscape of the international human rights movement. The Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the Oak Foundation and Humanity United, seeking to make strategic investments to harness technology in the service of human rights, face choices about priorities and opportunities for strategic collaboration as well as risks and challenges in this rapidly changing field.This study shows how the HR-Tech space encompasses technology both as infrastructure on which rights in the digital and the physical worlds depend, and as instruments that can help make human rights defenders and their work more effective and secure. Many HR-Tech discussions focus too narrowly on the challenges related to the development and application of the technology itself. Instead, the study identifies broader areas of HR-Tech work that should be at the center of strategic visions and projects. These include building global alliances; developing norms; improving the production, management and analysis of evidence; enhancing cross-sector collaboration; and thinking about technology deployment and adoption early on. Donors who fund HR-Tech work will be more effective with a comprehensive understanding of this broad landscape. They can also support each other and the broader field by sharing knowledge from their current initiatives and past lessons for effective advancement of human rights in the new technology landscape.A bibliography is included

On or off the record? Detecting patterns of silence about death in Guatemala’s National Police Archive

This paper investigates how the production of police records was linked to the policies of repression and violence during Guatemala’s civil war. We provide empirical evidence from the Historical Archive of the Guatemalan National Police that the police used language, terminology and codes to record deaths in ways that produced silences about the level of violence during the height of repressive military rule. Using a dataset derived from a statistically valid sample of police records together with qualitative archival analysis, we find evidence of profound changes in the terminology used to record and report on deaths—changes that follow a pattern consistent with the policies of information control and concealment of the three different military regimes that ruled Guatemala between 1978 and 1985. We argue that researchers will need to consider the silences created through the selective use of terminology in documents when using archives to produce historical knowledge. Detecting and intercepting silence will be especially important as state records are increasingly sought in service of ongoing pursuits for truth and justice about past atrocities.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136091/1/Guberek-Hedstrom-Final-Submission-Jan-2017-title-text.pdfDescription of Guberek-Hedstrom-Final-Submission-Jan-2017-title-text.pdf : Full Text pre-publication versio

Data Dilemmas: The Science and Politics of Communicating Uncertainty in Human Rights Information

Data and statistics about crime and human rights violations are incomplete and biased, yet numbers are in high demand. Advocates and policymakers often tally up available, yet partial data and present them as hard numbers to bring attention to abuses and to influence aid and accountability. As calls for transparency about data limitations increase, I ask two related questions: 1) How do human rights advocates think about the value of quantification and its associated uncertainty when using it to inform and influence audiences? 2) With respect to quantitative evidence about violence, crime or abuse, how do different presentations of data uncertainty affect decision outcomes? Using mixed methods – qualitative and experimental – this research teases out the political, behavioral and methodological challenges that advocates face as they collect, communicate, and deploy violence statistics in global and local human rights advocacy contexts. Semi-structured interviews with twenty-eight frontline human rights advocates (focused on global, U.S., or Colombian issues) reveal that data uncertainty is an unavoidable reality in human rights work, and advocates are keenly aware of this. Advocates mostly share consistent and as-of-yet unrecognized ideas and practices about what could be called “good enough numbers” for advocacy. Central to these practices are pragmatic, yet principled tradeoffs that pull advocates away from strictly rigorous treatment of data and uncertainty. Transparency is a key issue that advocates somewhat reluctantly reduce in pragmatic considerations of benefits and risks. The survey experiment employed three vignettes and four uncertainty messages, designed on the basis of science communication theory and human rights communication practices, to explore the impact of “being transparent” about data limitations. Responses from 970 college graduates confirm that 1) numbers have strong anchoring effects, but also show that 2) simple caveats about uncertainty do little to de-anchor decision-making. The research also finds novel evidence that 3) only one message type – called here “expert interception” – effectively drives people to account for uncertainty in their decisions (replicating earlier findings about communicating uncertainty in weather forecasting (Joslyn & LeClerc, 2013)). Finally, 4) while different studies suggest perceptions of trustworthiness of information providers may increase, or decrease, with different levels of uncertainty information, this study finds minimal fluctuation in source trust across any of the tested uncertainty messages. Information providers face a clear choice in allowing numbers to speak for themselves or proactively mitigating bias through language – a choice that is inherently political. It appears that uncertainty is most effectively conveyed when communicators intercept the power of numbers to project “mechanical objectivity” with their expert knowledge about the data generation process and data limitations. A core theoretical contribution of this dissertation is the elucidation of a “rigor-pragmatism continuum” – a novel framework informed by the research findings. The continuum challenges the good-bad dichotomy that is common in critiques of human rights numbers and offers an alternative to support more nuanced analysis about how human rights advocates wrestle with using uncertain numbers. As a whole, this dissertation has wide-reaching implications for human rights and science communication scholarship and practice.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153452/1/tamyg_1.pd

Llamando la muerte por su nombre: rompiendo el silencio del Archivo de la Policía Nacional de Guatemala

El análisis cuantitativo del "big data" histórico puede contribuir a explicar cómo las prácticas de generación de registros en torno a la muerte facilitaron las políticas de represión y control, escribe Tamy Guberek (University of Michigan)

‘Irreversible’: The Role of Digitization to Repurpose State Records of Repression

Since mid-2005, archivist–activists at the Historical Archive of the National Police of Guatemala have been digitizing a century’s worth of previously suppressed police records so as to protect, mobilize and provide access to them – 23 million pages to date. We find that digitization amplified the staff’s repurposing of the archive to serve victims of human rights violations. Digitization enhances short- and long-term safeguards for the archive’s physical integrity, probative value and enduring accessibility, but has required critical human factors and institutional solidarity, most notably partnerships with international donors and allied organizations, and Guatemalan nongovernmental organizations. Finally, technology offers a lens to analyze the persistent challenges to promoting truth and justice in Guatemala. We show how simple, often ad hoc approaches to digitization developed under political urgency can have an irreversible impact when used to amplify a unified mission driven by a committed community of archival workers

El uso de datos cuantitativos para entender la violencia sexual relacionada con el conflicto armado colombiano: desafíos y oportunidades [reseña]

El documento es un informe investigación de un estudio realizado en Colombia que aborda algunos de los retos de la medición de la violencia sexual en el contexto específico del conflicto armado interno colombiano. Metodológicamente se trata de un estudio de factibilidad. Los datos se recogen a través de los métodos de entrevista, grupos focales y revisión documental. Las autoras aplican una entrevista a profundidad a expertos, sujetos con alta experiencia profesional en el tema de violencia sexual en Colombia; se realiza una revisión de literatura de documentos y bases de datos pertenecientes a fuentes estatales, y de instituciones no gubernamentales interesadas en la temática de derechos humanos y asuntos de género. Para tener acceso a algunos de los datos de fuentes estatales sobre violencia sexual, fue necesario en algunos casos recurrir a solicitudes respaldadas en derechos de petición; como tercer método de recolección de datos se desarrollan unos grupos focales con los entrevistados y otras personas interesadas. La duración de la investigación fue de un año. Las autoras estructuran el documento de informe de investigación en tres partes: resumen ejecutivo, entender los datos sobre la violencia en el contexto colombiano y anexos. En la primera parte se presenta un resumen ejecutivo con el desarrollo de tres puntos: introducción; resultados claves y recomendaciones

“Irreversible”: El rol de la Digitalización para Reutilizar los Registros de la Represión del Estado

Desde mediados del 2005, archivistas- activistas del Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional de Guatemala han estado digitalizando documentos policiales ocultos por más de un siglo para protegerlos, organizarlos y proporcionar acceso a los mismos -- 23 millones de páginas hasta la fecha. Encontramos que la digitalización amplificó la reutilización del archivo por parte del personal del AHPN para servir a las víctimas de violaciones a los derechos humanos. La digitalización aumenta las garantías de salvaguarda de la integridad física, el valor probatorio de los registros y la posibilidad de accesibilidad duradera del archivo, a corto y largo plazo pero ha requerido de factores humanos esenciales y relaciones institucionales de solidaridad, con más notoriedad en las asociaciones con donantes y organizaciones aliadas y con las ONGs locales en Guatemala. Por último, la tecnología ofrece un lente para analizar los desafíos persistentes en el trabajo de la promoción de la verdad y la justicia en Guatemala. Mostramos cómo los enfoques simples, algunas veces ad hoc, para la digitalización desarrollados bajo urgencia política pueden tener un impacto irreversible cuando se utilizan para amplificar una misión unificada impulsada por una comunidad comprometida de trabajadores archivistas. (traducción al español