Landscapes of disappearance in São Paulo: data modelling and visual analytics
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 23/09/2020

The  Brazilian  military  dictatorship  (1964-1985)  used  disappearance  as  one  of  its  strategies,  leaving hundreds of missing persons whose fate and cause of death, until today, is unknown. Usually,  missing  cases  are  under-documented,  with  little  information  about  health,  location  or personal objects found [1][2]. From an archaeological perspective, we have modelled and analysed the data obtained from over 2000 missing person cases that may help us to understand some of the common practices carried out by the dictatorial regime [3]. We focus on how traces of identity of unknown people may be discovered, and what malpractice signals exist in the da-tasets. Is it possible to look beyond raw data and assist its understanding through software-based techniques? We have applied a qualitative software approach based on assisting the knowledge generation process through a visual analytics study. Visual analytics [4] brings together some computational techniques for innovative visual representations based on cognitive principles to facilitate the reasoning on human information. It has been successfully applied in several domains: biomedicine [5], geology [6], finance [7], humanistic domains [8][9], and recently archaeology [11]. We cover the complete research process, from the data model initial stages [10] to the creation of specific software visualizations of missing people cases. This paper shows the  results  of  the  data  modelling  and  visual  analytics  study,  and  describes  how  this  process  helped us to obtain some clues about the repression practices performed in São Paulo, further reflecting on the action of repression on bodies "that do not matter" and their identity.


Patricia Martin-Rodilla, Marcia L. Hattori, Cesar Gonzalez-Perez