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 !!!!