Ten years recovering the memory of republican exile with citizen collaboration. The results of E-xiliad@s Project: a perspective from Digital Humanities and Digital Public History

Abstract

The Spanish republican exile was the result of the Republican defeat in 1939 by the Francoist army, led by the general Franco. Nearly half a million-people had to go into mass exile during the months of January and February, through the French border crossings. Many other exiles did so, months later, from Alicante to the North African coasts. These places of destination were, in most cases, places of passage to successive destination countries in Europe and, especially, in Latin America. The international nature of this historical event means that there is currently a large number of personal files scattered in different places around the world. In order to recover these stories and files, the e-xiliad@s project was conceived in 2009, with a DH and Public History perspective: www.exiliadosrepublicanos.info. A crowdsourcing project that, through a multilingual digital platform, retrieves unpublished documents about the anonymous exiled. The main target audience is composed by relatives and friends of the exiles and those interested in the subject. This initiative, has been funded twice (2009 and 2011) by the General Directorate of Migrations of the Spanish government; it uses a methodology created ad hoc to obtaining data based on public participation from citizen science perspective (digital platform built using Drupal 6 LTS, with a MySQL database). The content is generated on-line by the public at an international level and coordinated by a scientific specialist. For almost a decade, this crowdsourcing project has been developing an online public engagement strategy for public participation based on open data, supported by a custom digital platform and its digital social networks, with more than 1.5K followers. E-xiliad@s recovered around 500 unpublished archives among photographs, memories, official documents, letters and interviews associated with 200 exile records. In 2020, it has received an award from the Asociación de Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas.