Las notas a pie de página, los párrafos escritos a lapicero por la parte de atrás de un documento, las cartas olvidadas dentro de un extenso informe, o los fragmentos tachados que un buen «escaneo» puede revelar, han sido muy útiles para esclarecer oscuras partes de nuestra historia contemporánea. El advenimiento del formato digital parecía asegurar que estos errores se eliminarían poco a poco, pero no, los documentos en formato Microsoft Word pueden contener ingentes cantidades de información que el cándido redactor creía haber eliminado. Esta historia es de lo más interesante:
The secret Iraq documents my 8-year-old found. With a couple of keystrokes, you too can read the hidden history of the Coalition Provisional Authority, America’s late, unlamented occupation government in Iraq.
When I started studying the massive archive of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government that ruled Iraq from April 21, 2003, to June 28, 2004, I expected my experience to be different. I didn’t think any letters would fall in my lap, because the archive is paperless. The first archive of occupation created during the IT era, the CPA’s virtual history can be found online at www.cpa-iraq.org, on thousands of pages that each begin «Long live the new Iraq!»
But I forgot to factor in the ubiquity of human error, and of Microsoft Word. It turns out the IT era really is different, after all. It took my 8-year-old son just a few seconds to shake loose some hidden history from within the official transcript of the CPA.
My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the «View» menu at the top of the screen and select the «Mark up» option. If you are in a Word document where «Track changes» has been turned on, hitting «Mark up» will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name «Administrator’s Weekly Economic Report» suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author’s paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors. I soon figured out that with a few keystrokes I could see the deleted passages in 20 of the 42 Word documents I’d downloaded. For an academic like myself it was a small treasure trove, and after I’d stopped hooting and hollering it took some time before I could convince my startled son that he hadn’t done anything wrong.