Postwar Trials in Catalonia

The Postwar Trials in Catalonia project investigates Francoist repression after the Spanish Civil War by analyzing a dataset of 63,961 court-martial cases annulled by Catalonia’s government in 2017. These cases, extracted from judicial archives, primarily cover the early years of the dictatorship, with a particular focus on executions and sentencing patterns. While the historical backdrop of widespread postwar repression is acknowledged, the project's core emphasis lies in cleaning, organizing, and presenting the data through visualizations like graphs, tables, and interactive maps created with Flourish Studios.

The project reveals how sentencing trends evolved over time, highlights regional differences within Catalonia, and even traces migration patterns of convicted individuals. A crucial aspect of the work is addressing data inconsistencies—such as incomplete or repeated records—by establishing clear criteria for inclusion. Ultimately, this project aims to make a heavily silenced chapter of Catalan history accessible through empirical, visual storytelling.

My contribution

This page was the final project for DH201: Intro to Digital Humanities taught by Professor Miriam Posner in Winter 2021. For this project, I selected and worked with a dataset published by the ANC (Catalan National Archive). This dataset which contained information on 63,961 Catalan individuals illegally tried during Franco's dictatorship. I performed the full data cleaning process using OpenRefine, organizing the data into facets and filters to facilitate analysis and address missing categories. I designed and created five data visualizations and a map using the Flourish Studios platform. These visualizations explored the total number of executions versus martial-court trials, sentencing types over time and by gender, execution rates by Catalan province, regional disparities explained through migration patterns, the geographic distribution of trials across municipalities, and an experimental non-geographic mapping of individuals. In preparing the data, I also made decisions about omissions—for example, excluding rows missing key temporal information or faceting out individuals whose residence was outside Catalonia, to keep the focus territorially coherent. Finally, I built a site using Mobirise, designing the interface of the page, and the navigation elements from scratch, and wrote a narrative that integrated the visualizations, the data and the historical context.