Las notas a pie de p\u00e1gina, los p\u00e1rrafos escritos a lapicero por la parte de atr\u00e1s de un documento, las cartas olvidadas dentro de un extenso informe, o los fragmentos tachados que un buen \u00abescaneo\u00bb puede revelar, han sido muy \u00fatiles para esclarecer oscuras partes de nuestra historia contempor\u00e1nea. El advenimiento del formato digital parec\u00eda asegurar que estos errores se eliminar\u00edan poco a poco, pero no, los documentos en formato Microsoft Word pueden contener ingentes cantidades de informaci\u00f3n que el c\u00e1ndido redactor cre\u00eda haber eliminado. Esta historia es de lo m\u00e1s interesante:<\/p>\n
The secret Iraq documents my 8-year-old found.<\/a><\/strong> 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.
\nWhen 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 \u00abLong live the new Iraq!\u00bb
\nBut 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.
\nMy 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 \u00abView\u00bb menu at the top of the screen and select the \u00abMark up\u00bb option. If you are in a Word document where \u00abTrack changes\u00bb has been turned on, hitting \u00abMark up\u00bb 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 \u00abAdministrator’s Weekly Economic Report\u00bb 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. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Las notas a pie de p\u00e1gina, los p\u00e1rrafos escritos a lapicero por la parte de atr\u00e1s de un documento, las cartas olvidadas dentro de un extenso informe, o los fragmentos tachados que un buen \u00abescaneo\u00bb puede revelar, han sido muy \u00fatiles para esclarecer oscuras partes de nuestra historia contempor\u00e1nea. El advenimiento del formato digital parec\u00eda… Leer m\u00e1s »Historia oculta 2.0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[324],"class_list":["post-899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actualidad","tag-historia-cia-datos-eeuu-irak"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/junjan.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}