The Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo Digital Archive

The Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM) Digital Archive is a collaborative post-custodial digitization project that aims to preserve and provide access to the records of Guatemala’s oldest human rights organization. The collection contains the records of over 3,300 investigations of forced dissapearances during Guatemala’s armed internal conflict (1960-1996). Ongoing archival work supports the GAM’s mandate to provide legal representation to the families of the disappeared, educational opportunities for Guatemalan youth and to shape public memory of the armed conflict. Over the past two years, the GAM has digitized nearly all of the case files (representing over eight linear meters of records) and has created a master case registry. Haverford librarians and students have created custom web applications for processing, accessing and researching the archival materials.   A group of paid undergraduate fellows, the Digital Scholarship Compañeros, have read, transcribed, and described hundreds of cases.

For the GAM project, I started a research-oriented application with

Digital Scholarship Compañeros

Mariana Ramirez on forms of violence in Rabinal (Global DH 2019)

Digital history projects in the sciences

Visual similarity network visualization 

  • Word and image embeddings
  • Trained Keras model on new research categories (fingerprint, state seal, handwriting)

Archival Context

Collection Navigation

Transcription

Person, place and organization records 

Launch of the GAM archives June 4th, 2019

 

Public Access Site

GAM

By Andrew Janco

GAM

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