New opportunity, looking for a new source

Today I have spent only one hour in the Archive of the Vallès Oriental region.

The documents Im tracing there are the local magazines 1979-1991, expecting that the new governments are published in such kind of local papers, most of them owned or issued by the municipalities.

I could retrieve a lot of information, from the age when not only Internet was not existing, but also the computers were available for a limited set of population

Last day fishing in Barcelona

As it happened in Tarragona, no one single municipality of the Barcelona province took care of publishing the composition of the local governments in 1979 nor in 1983.

This means that I'm dependent on the kindness of the city archive's responsibles.

In fact, the people in the Archive of the Diputació de Barcelona, the ones reponsible for the daily publication of the province official gazette, have been always very kind and helpfull, carrying up and down the heavy volumes of the archive. So it's a pitty that my work there is over

This picture is from inside, where I was working

This is the building of the Historical Archive








Well.... I will have to contact each municipality, one by one..... boooooring!

Christmas lemon tree

Who's complaining about the climate change ?

Here we are, mid December, wearing t-shirts. We have to complain because of the unpredictible future effects, but we would agree to leave it as it is!

Santa Claus is coming to town, again

Twelve months since I posted the picture of the kitchen after the Christmas lunch.

A lot has been done, but still a lot to do. As a summary of the year I can state that the pace of the projects is slower than the worst scenario that I could predict.

Capturing the information is a real issue, giving value to the project, but transforming it in a boring stream of data collection.

It has been a good option to do it on my own, having the possibility of discovering unexpected coalition agreements, opening new options for research, but at the same time, this option is slowing down the evolution of the project

My supervisor is expecting to get the available data, collected and sorted in one month time, but I'm afraid that I will need, at least, two more months, till the end of February 2012.

Did you ever heard about "el caganer" ?

For detailed information, please follow : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caganer

As matter of fact:

A logical name for a Social Affairs Councillor is Mercy ( Misericòrdia in Catalan )

Such things happen in Tarragona

Again, in Falset 1983, a Councillor for Youth affairs and Cemetery, a personal point of view about life.

50% of the field work done

I'm studying 132 cities and towns, all along 9 electoral contests.

This will produce a matrix with 1.188 cells.

Today I have filled-in information concerning 50% of the cells!!!!

A fantastic result for 12 months of work. Are you serious ?. Yes. A historical success !!

142.000 records

Good enough for the Guinness Award, and let's hope also for the Doctoral Dissertation. I have an EXCEL file containing more than 140.000 records, all inputed manually.

( about 6.000 lines, containing more than 20 fields each one )

This will not explain the pain in my back at 100%, but will be very close.

I started to send e-mail messages to a certain number of cities, asking ( begging ) for the information about 1979 and 1983.

I'm receiving answers !!!!

1979 is arrived !

Till today I have been working the elections of the years 2007, 2003, 1999, 1995 and 1991

Few days ago I started to work the year 2011, because the composition of the new governments is already available in the web page of each city.

But today I could get data for 1979, 1983 and 1987 for the city of Girona. This is the first time that I can see a matrix with data referred to 1979. I advise to look at the pictures of the councilors

http://www.girona.cat/sgdap/cat/regidors_cerques.php

Select the year in the field "legislatura" and click the icon "cercar"

Sommerferien wieder

Again,

A luxury of our First World way of living: yearly holidays.

This time in the South of France. National Parc of Cèvennes.

Time for hiking, and noticing that I can't follow my son's speed anymore

Tarragona, nice but the disaster has been announced

I wanted to work 1979 and 1983 elections.

I have got registers enough from 1987 and ahead.

For a Municipality it is not compulsory to inform about the name of the Mayor and the Councilors to the Official Gazzette, but since 1987 they are used to do it.

No single one did it in 1979 nor in 1983.

Back home with empty papers

Well, I had to invest a lot of time reading each single page, because I couldn't believe the fact that no one was there.

In 1983, the loans were given with an interest rate of 16 % !

What a pitty.

I don't know how, but I must talk to a Secretary of a Municipality, of a certain age, to know where this  information was stored.

Bye Tarragona.

Fun in Tarragona

I'm working with the documents relating the province of Tarragona for the elctions 1987, 1991 and 1995.

This is people making fun of their political task.

Can you imagine yourself being the Counselor for slaughterhouses and cemetery ? Mr. Pere Pi Ferrer did it in 1995 in Falset.

What about being the Couselor for PA ( Megafonia in catalan )  ?  Mr. Jordi Borràs Ollé succeded in 1995 in Móra d'Ebre.

Doing nothing ?

Not at all

I can read the Official Gazzette from the provinces of Lleida and Girona, all in their accessible public data bases. So it is only a matter of time, because I have to read, one by one, each issue of the months of June till December each election year.

Barcelona tracking depends on my possibilities for visting the library. Same for Tarragona. The difference is that one month of Barcelona need three books of 128 pages each, plus some addenda, while a month of Tarragona only needs one book of 68 pages. This means that the speed for reading is much higher.

The Tarragona's library is open from 8 till 15h, while in Barcelona only from 10 till 14h. The result is that I need more than one working day for one election year in Barcelona, while in one day I can get all the records for three election years.

This is only a matter of time.

This is only a boring task.

This is only a summer job for a young student like me


"Tarragona m'esborrona"

SNA people

I'm facing the responsibility of creating a new acronym

SNA stands for "Say NO, attitude", and it refers to the people not loving what they do.

Ugly people, in general, because their emotional attitude is physiologically replicated. They are punished living their lives.

I have a nice white list, but also a long black list of SNA's. The good thing is that they are a multitude, but they don't succeed to turn the world in black

Who is the Devil of the offical documents?

The answer is: The Secretary of the Municipality

This is an official position occupied by lawyers, responsible for the legal quality of the agreements and decissions issued by the Municipality.


But.... what I'm noticing, reading the documents that they send to the official gazzette, is that the level of creativity is very ( too ) high, in the sense that the same protocol ( i.e.: the entitlement of the elected members to replace the Major when being absent ), becomes a possibility for creating mess:

- If one decides to define the substitute number 1, 2, 3.., the other assigns the substitute number 1, while numbers 2 and 3 are names, simply "substitutes"

- If one defines the areas of responsibility, and later assigns an elected members to each area, the other prefers to assign persons to the areas, and only then give the details about the content of the area.


There is no a single act that can be compared from one Municipality to another one.

But, I'm afraid that the worst is still to come:

This morning I have been in the library of the historical archive, searching the remaining information of 1995, and starting to work 1991. The structure of the public documents, is different again, with a rather complicated structure.

(I'm doing it only for pleasure, not for fun, but I can adapt my goals if necessary !!)

The work load for the comming months. A boring tale

I already have 1021 records in an EXCEL sheet.

This is covering three elections ( 1999, 2003 and 2007 ) for 21 cities.

Taking into consideration that I need data for 130 cities, related to a total of 8 elections, I can expect the work to be finalized when reaching the level of 16.000 records.

Can you believe it?
One by one....

The steps are the following for the last three elections, which information is on-line:

1- Read the session after the election, where the Major of the city entitles to some elected to become responsibles for a certain area ( Health, Sports, Economy.. )
Write the name of the elected in the spreadsheet, male o female, and area of responsibility
2- Read the electoral list, published some weeks before the election, to know the party to which each candidate belongs.


When the document is not on-line I must visit the Historical Archive of the offical gazzette, in Barcelona, opening hours from 10 till 14 . I must read each single page, scanning for the cities and documents that I need.  To cover the maximum possibilities of getting such information, I use to read four months of the archived documents, In total I expect to invest from 6 to 10 complete days

People updating their family names

Currently I'm working with the records relating the villages smaller than 250 inhabitants, from 1987 till 2007

My first hard work is to verify the 6.600 records in order to guarantee that the names can be recognized, in the sense that Mr. Joaquin ( In Spanish ) Tortades, is the same candidate than Mr Joaquim ( In Catalan ) Tortades, and also the same than Mr Quim ( Familiar form of the name in Catalan ) Tortades.

This is needed to be able to follow their political career along the time, specially if they have been changing from a party to another, or to others in general.

The names have been manually digitalized, and there is a high number of typing errors, which makes standarization to be a huge work

and the winner is...

This is a post coincident with the Oscar awards, so the title is the best one.

As expected ( ! ), currently, all the available records at the Ministery, are properly stored in my pc.

It has not been easy. It has taken a lot of time, emails and phone calls to get their attention in order to spend a little bit of their time ( public servants ) to cooperate with me.

The problem is moving to another field. They can't provide me with the details of the municipalities of more than 250 inhabitants, and less than 100.000, so 80% is not available.

Yesterday I spent 4 hours in the library of the Province Official Gazzette ( BOP ) of Barcelona, surfing through the June-October books of the year 1995.

My average speed was 20 municipalities per hour. The problem is that they can publish their decisions about government structure along four months, without an official publication date.

It means that I have to read,  day by day, searching for the needed document.

I need information about 80 cities, in 5 electoral contests, giving a result of 400 documents for which I don't know the publication day

If the average speed remains 20 per hour, I will need 20 hours. If the Library opens 4 hours a day, in 5-7 days should be ready

Meanwhile I will start to work with the documents downloaded from the on-line registers and the ones recorded yesterday, to guarantee that this is a workable stuff

It seems that collecting data will be the core of the investigation

The Gollum of information

When the administration makes data available to the world through a website, and somewhere in the website they offer: for ad-hoc files, please contact..., what I would never expect is to have to wait 7 days for a  negative answer.

The database has been built up with public information ( elections ) paid with public funds. How can they consider themselves as the owners of the information ?

Is it possible that they have never heard about the society of knowledge and sharing information?

This becomes a personal war. I will be the winner. Their only option is When, but they still don't know it.

Information is preciousss, is mineeee....