The first Summer School of the PortADa project marked the starting point in the development and consolidation of this collaborative initiative. Held mainly at the National University of Mar del Plata, it enabled significant progress in defining the project’s organisation and methodology.

While the main technical and coordination tasks took place in Mar del Plata, some actions aimed at disseminating the project and its objectives were also carried out at the Port of Buenos Aires.

During this meeting, key topics were addressed for the development of the research, including:

• The selection, assessment, and analysis of documentary sources to be used for each port..
• The definition of common and specific fields for describing the content of the news items for each source.
• The design of a standardised file-naming system for both image files and text files generated through OCR (optical character recognition).
• The establishment of a general research procedure, encompassing all stages of collaborative work among historians.
• The creation of a digitisation protocol for images, especially useful for ports—such as Buenos Aires—that have limited digitised historical press material..

As a result of all this work, a server named Papicli (PortADa API Client) was launched, serving as the operational core of the project. This tool enables researchers—even those without technical knowledge—to carry out the various phases of the workflow, such as image correction, segmentation into blocks, text extraction, and the conversion of extracted information into data.

In addition to the technical and methodological progress made, this first Summer School provided a key space for establishing academic links and mutual understanding among participants. Particularly noteworthy was the beginning of joint work between historians and computer scientists, consolidating an interdisciplinary approach that forms one of the pillars of the PortADa project.

The Summer School concluded with a public academic seminar, attended by all the researchers present at the event, as well as invited experts involved in related projects. Within this framework, presentations were given on the progress made during the Summer School, along with lectures by renowned international researchers:

• César Ducruet (Directeur de Recherche, CNRS): The World Seastems project: harnessing big maritime network data (1880–2010) [see link]..
• François Dremeaux (Université d’Angers) y Erwan Jacomino (Université Le Havre): MarCoMo [see link]..
• Benjamin Brice (University of British Columbia): Marsella, puertos mediterráneos y rutas migratorias a Buenos Aires, 1892–1932 [see link]..

One of the key outcomes of the meeting was the shared interest in keeping communication channels open and exploring opportunities for future collaboration.

The Mar del Plata Summer School laid the foundations for sustained collaboration, enriched by the diversity of expertise and by a working infrastructure designed to grow and adapt to the challenges of digital historical research.