Summary
The Brazilian military dictatorship lasted for 21 years (1964-1985), using enforced disappearance as one of its strategies and leaving hundreds of missing persons whose fate and cause of death, until today, is unknown. In São Paulo city, some of them were buried as unknown, usually called indigent, a very problematic category oftentimes seen as derogatory and with a different social treatment in comparison to other people.Usually, missing cases are under-documented, with little information about health, location, personal profile or personal objects found. From an archaeological perspective, we have modelled and analysed the data obtained from over 2000 missing person cases in order to find data patterns that may help us to understand some of the common practices carried out by the dictatorial regime. We especially focus on how the categorization of unknown people is reflected in the data, how traces of identity may be discovered, and what malpractice signals exist in the datasets (through people’s clothes, personal objects, or cause of death discrepancies).How the repression practices are reflected in the data? Is it possible to look beyond raw data and assist the understanding of these data through software-based techniques?We have applied a qualitative software approach based on assisting the knowledge generation process from the source data through a visual analytics study. Visual analytics brings together a series of computational techniques for innovative visual representations based on cognitive principles to facilitate the reasoning on human information. This qualitative approach has been successfully applied in several domains, from biomedicine, geology or finance to more humanistic domains, including some recent studies in archaeology.We have applied visual analytics to cover the complete research process, from the data model initial stages to the creation of specific software visualizations of missing people cases.This paper shows the results of the data modelling and visual analytics study, and describes how the associated process helped us to obtain some clues about the repression practices performed in São Paulo, further reflecting on the action of repression on bodies "that do not matter" and their identity.