ABSTRACT: 

 

Workers’ Voices in the Digital Age: A Newspaper-Based Collection on Portuguese Self-Management​

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Following the Portuguese Carnation Revolution (1974), workers autonomously organised in response to the severe economic and financial crises inherited from the forty-one-year Estado Novo dictatorship. (Fontes & Cabreira, 2020) Without trade union support, they occupied and self-managed workplaces to improve living and working conditions. (Fontes & Cabreira, 2020) This digital collection preserves news items from two historically significant Portuguese newspapers, “Diário de Lisboa” and “O Combate.” Its primary objective is to foreground workers' arguments for workplace occupations while providing insights into their organisational structures, dynamics, and fluidity. By centring workers' perspectives, the collection contributes to a more nuanced understanding of their experiences. Informed by methodologies from various Digital Humanities Conferences, the project aligns with established best practices in the field. (Terrón Quintero et al., 2023)

The collection's development follows two key methodological approaches.[1] First, a critical analysis of newspapers extracts articles thematically relevant to the self-management movement. Second, to enhance accuracy and efficiency, PDF newspaper files are processed using the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool, Tesseract, rendering documents searchable and facilitating keyword identification.[2] Initially, 316 news items from “Diário de Lisboa” were compiled into a dedicated spreadsheet[3], which then underwent refinement to ensure consistency and correct minor syntactical errors.[4] The final curation phase involved critically evaluating and proofreading each item to maintain content quality and determine public accessibility.

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This project highlights the notable lack of archival development concerning this movement. In the absence of a stable institution dedicated to preserving its memory, both academics and the public encounter significant challenges in accessing relevant historical information. The project aims to facilitate scholarly and public engagement by developing the first fully dedicated digital collection on the Autogestão movement in Portugal and centralising research within a unified digital platform.[5] By encouraging users to explore the collection and conduct further investigations across archival networks and research institutions, this initiative contributes to a broader understanding of the movement's historical significance. (Sinn, 2012)

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The digital collection’s implementation fosters engagement with both academia and the wider public. By establishing a centralised platform, this project serves as a foundational resource for researchers, ensuring accessibility to primary materials. Additionally, collaboration with archival institutions promotes research cooperation, advancing knowledge of self-management movements. Through this initiative, users are encouraged to critically examine the materials and contribute to expanding the historiographical discourse surrounding workplace occupations. By structuring and systematising this repository, the project enhances both academic research and public awareness, reinforcing the importance of digital humanities in historical preservation and analysis.

 

[1]  The methodological approaches are well defined within the “Development Stages of a Digital Collection”.

[2] To gain insight into the volume of extracted news items, consult the following URL: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SdDptcbeO2P5dl4Emz9-mXA-B8_HqnD4iKL5AVXFNDs/edit?usp=sharing

[3] To gain insight into the volume of extracted news items, consult the following URL: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C3YOPINsrzw1HmiwDfVuEHqoCkMBqVmWLlTU_CTYnKI/edit?usp=sharing

[4] To gain insight into the data refinement process, consult the image “Data Refinement through OpenRefine”.

[5] To understand how this digital collection will serve as a starting point in the academic research process, consult the image

“Workers’ Voices in the Digital Age: A Newspaper-Based Collection on Portuguese Self-Management - A starting Point”.

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Bibliografia:

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Fontes, J. F. F., & Cabreira, P. P. (2020). Entre a autogestão e o controlo operário: Os casos da Setenave e Sogantal durante o período revolucionário português (1974–1975). Cadernos do Arquivo Municipal, 13, Article 13. https://doi.org/10.48751/CAM-2020-13112

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Sinn, D. (2012). Impact of digital archival collections on historical research. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(8), 1521–1537. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22650

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Terrón Quintero, G., Guerra Figueredo, E., Solernou Ferrer, A., & Echarri Ramirez, B. (2023, June 30). Cuban digital collections: An approach for collaboration and innovation. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8228536

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