In 2018, in collaboration with Wikimedia Foundation Philippines and Bantayog ng mga Bayani (BB) Foundation, a small team of researchers was tasked with digitizing BB's small archive on mosquito press ephemera from the 70s and 80s, the tail-end of the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda. ^[1]

This 3-month program at Bantayog ng mga Bayani—officially under the Wikipedian in Residence format—had a specific goal: to use the digitized material from Bantayog’s archive as secondary sources in the writing of wiki pages about the Marcoses and their cronies. The initiative arises in response to repeated, concerted attempts at historical revisionism on Marcos-related Wikipedia pages. This suspicious editing activity was flagged by experienced Wikipedia editors and democracy activists in Manila. The revisionism coincided with the election of Rodrigo Duterte, aka The Punisher, as president of the Philippines and with the failed vice-presidential campaign of Bong Bong Marcos, son of Ferdinand and Imelda. Though Bong Bong's bid for the vice presidency was ultimately unsuccessful, Duterte has still expressed his support for the Marcos heir, raising concerns about the possibility of a larger return of the Marcoses to power. There is a fear that, should any of the Marcos family members gain larger political traction, one of the first orders of business on their agenda would be to dismantle institutions such as BB and destroy evidence of their historical abuses.

The resulting digitized material of the WiR program has been requested from BB in order to safely upload and store it on a server outside of the Philippines. Students of PZI XPUB will be tasked to construct an archive structure that should safeguard this material, making it difficult to locate and dismantle in case of attempted censorship. Playing upon the idea of a "mosquito" archive—a swarm or scourge of information that is difficult to exterminate—the idea is to leave behind a fully functional file storage system that may also take into account the following on-the-ground needs for political activists engaged in gathering data. These are, specifically, needs related to fact creation (making original information sources), fact assembly (creation of archives of these sources), and fact retrieval (building of narratives with original sources). These facts refer to politically sensitive topics in which a microminority opposes an authoritarian regime's interests. They are framed here within the biological condition of the mosquito itself.

Master plan

text, images, pdf (audio)
    \                                            DEV
     `-> mediawiki
           \
            `-> site generator
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ \_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
                       \
                        `-> static website
                                   \
                                   |`-> access via Tor
  RELEASE                          \ 
                                    `-> print publication 

Schedule

Jan 8: Michael

Digital zines I: PDF Custom Publishing Pipelines with commandline

Jan 13: Andre

Prototyping 2020.01.13

pad https://pad.xpub.nl/p/Prototyping_2020.01.13

Jan 22: Michael

Digital zines II: HTML and friends: /Markdown/Pandoc/CSS epub/html (relative links, ereaders) -- digital publishing toolkit... outcome epub + (mini)websites

=== Jan 27: with OSP + Andre === XPUB1-with OSP + Andre : 11:00 - [in the WH.02.110 (Instruction Room IAS) the classroom is booked between 10:30 - 18:30]

Feb 3: Andre

Semantically structured wiki

• Semantic Mediawiki or Cargo
• Set and structure MW
• Forms + templates: how to create
• Upload Files via API
• Query Files, based on Semantic structures

Feb 5: Michael

Creating (static) indexes: Python + whoosh for search (maybe using facets to produce two-level index listings?) Concordances, Historical (and contemporary indexes) -- tools for making indexes. (Static sites I) ... work on pdfs from week 1 (and eventually materials from special issue)

March 2 OSP + Andre

March 4: Michael

Compiling static sites: Working with the MediaWiki API + Python ... (html5lib, link absolutizing / relativizing)

March 16: Andre

March 18: Michael

Active Archives: using media to activate / cross reference / embody an archive

March 30: Andre

1 April: OSP + Michael

2 April: LAUNCH DAY