Political scientist Pete Moore wrote a fascinating item for Salon about his endeavor digging through the massive archive of Coalition Provisional Authority documents. As Moore acknowledged, he didn’t expect to find too many hidden gems — insightful personal letters may occasionally fall out of dusty old volumes in libraries, but the CPA’s archives are paperless.
But Moore neglected to factor in human error.
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.
Let this be a lesson to all of us — keep young children around for computer-related research projects.
Of course, this isn’t just an amusing story about a fruitful accident; Moore (with his son’s help) also found some important CPA-related details in the previously-hidden passages. I don’t want to alarm anyone, but apparently CPA officials were dangerously clueless about the insurgency and why it existed. Take a look.
