(Fraistat) So I'll turn it over to Jen for the introduction.
So I'm Jen. Nice to meet you.
I actually printed out what to say, in part because Anne
has a CD that's like 8 million pages longs full of incredible things
and I didn't want to fuck it up!
So for those of you who don't know who Anne is,
She's a leading scholar in media studies,
whose work links cultural studies, digital humanities and interactive media.
She received her PHD in Communications from the University of Illinois,
like some of the rest of us and since then
has been affiliated with Georgia Tech,
Xerox's PARC, the Annenberg School and School of Cinematic Studies and Arts
at the University of Southern California. She's currently
the Dean of the School of Media Studies and Professor of Media Studies
at The New School.
It's funny when you get to introduce somebody whose work
you've read and lusted over for like 15 years.
I think Anne's work for me, and for a lot of people in the room,
is a great representation of what feminist scholarship looks like
and risky feminist scholarship that, sort of takes a lot of agency,
not just for the reader, but sort of empowers you as a reader
and a scholar to go and implement the types of theories
and methodologies and approaches she has in her work,
so if you haven't read her yet, you should definitely
go pick up her work on Biotechnologies on the gendered body,
Designing Culture, which is a great book, on technological imagination
at work which is transmedia to transmedia publication,
that has all kinds of really great stuff that comes with it.
If there's a scholar to watch, as careers grow,
I hope she's got another 30 years in her because I want to see what she does next.
So I'm delighted to welcome today to give her talk:
'Heavy Data, Cultural Memories: Lessons from the AIDS Memorial Quilt
Digital Experience Project'.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm not sure I want to have another 30 years..
(laughter)
Not quite ready to retire but...
So thank you Jen, Stephanie, Neil, Trevor,
I had some great hosting already happening the other night
and I have been a fan, I've been kind of a "MITH groupie"
although I've not been, ever, here before,
but I'm been following the work of MITH from, I think,
it might have been the late 90's.
So I've known what's been going here, and I've certainly been a fan
of Matt's work as the digital humanities kind of blossomed,
to then make sense of what many people were doing before their term showed up.
So I'm actually delighted to be here.
I'm going to talk a little bit today about designing digital experiences
for the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
But before I get into the details of that project,
I thought that it would be useful to frame it with some of the theoretical
and the conceptual, kind of material, that comes to bear on this project.
So as Jen mentioned the recent transmedia book project,
Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work
is actually an example of transmedia scholarship
and it is also a project that took, probably, 15 years
to realize.
So as I joke often, I am the poster child
for slow scholarship and a scholarship that takes place
all over the place.
It started when I was in the academy, it continued when I was in industry,
and then I got, kind of, embroiled in some start up companies
in Silicon Valley, went back into the academy
and the last thing to do was actually finish the print based artifact,
which come to us in the form of a book.
And in the process it has many other different media forms
and what the project does, is it does its intellectual
and scholarly work across media forms.
There's an interactive documentary of the UN Conference on Women in 1995,
to an internationally touring museum exhibit on speculations
on the future of reading called "Experiments on the future of reading",
to the development more recently, of things that I call video printers,
short pedagogical pieces that take up top bits of the book,
and the print book was the last thing to be put in place
although it had been written and written in these moments
of oscillation, between doing digital projects and reflecting
on them and doing them and so on.
So, in an interesting way, I feel like the print based books
serves as an avatar for all the digital work and in fact the digital work
came and went and in some cases the shelf life of the digital work
was very brief, 18 months before something,
from the time something was developed to the time till it lapsed.
And the only thing I actually, at this moment,
will put my bottom dollar on, is that the book will outlast me,
whereas all the digitals are actually going to disappear,
probably disappear even as we speak.
If you go back to see any of the digital pieces,
you see the bit rot, that marks the traces of digital,
artifacts that were created on one platform,
and then upgraded and upgraded and upgraded
till they can't be upgraded anymore, they can't be recompiled,
they can't be... and they will be lost like in 2 years.
So the last chapter of the book is called "The work of the book in a digital age"
and really theorizes why, why did I spent the time
over those fifteen years doing other kinds of media scholarship,
why did I take a commitment to writing a book?
So the entire project, really, is a meditation
about the role of culture in technological innovation.
The book traveled, the work I did, traveled across three territories
certainly the academy, which is one site
in contemporary culture for the work of the technological imagination
and the production of and the process of technological innovation.
I also worked in the industry research center, Xerox PARC,
and on the third site, my third site of analysis,
is the cultural institution known as "The Science Technology Museum".
And so those are the places where I've done this work
I've done these projects and where the scholarships circulated.
In the academy, in the museum and in the research studies.
I'm actually not going to talk too much about the broader project.
I'm going to focus on one part of it which frames the work through the quilt.
Which is a chapter called
"Public Interactives and the Design of Technological Literacies."
What I'm taking on in this chapter, what is the cultural work
of this thing called Public Interactives
and how does it serve as the platform for cultural reproduction
over time and in the future.
To that end and what I've been working on for the last 7 to 8 years,
certainly since I've left Xerox PARC, is tracking a category
of what I will consider emergent technologies
on cultural studies scholar.
I draw heavily on Raymond William's understanding of residual
emergent and dominant technologies and I'm using this term
"emergent technology" to name a category
of technological experience that is not yet dominant,
but in its state of emergence. It's gaining traction
and gaining momentum, and in a pedagogical way,
I think this is becoming the motivation for this,
I think it's important to talk and to understand
this category of emergent technology, that I call Public Interactives,
to understand what kind of cultural work is going to be done.
To that end, for the last several years I've been looking at and tracing
through different type of travels, mostly in Asia,
and I've been working pretty heavily in China for the last 6 years,
on tracking the genres of Public Interactives.
I'm not going to go into this because that's not exactly the focus,
but looking at everything from Urban Screens,
which of course are, kind of very prominent,
type of part of the media ecology to other kinds of emergent genres
like interactive advertising and a new genre
of casual game called "Walk Up Games",
to a genre that is the kind of interactive experience that I've been engaged
in developing and this is the genre of the interactive Digital Memorial.
So wherever possible, whenever anyone tells me about something,
I literally put this on my to do list to track down examples
of interactive digital memorials, in public spaces,
so not digital memorials that are going on,
in the, kind of, pages of Facebook and so on,
but the things that are starting to be in the world
and trying to imagine what is the intersection
between the digital and the material
in the, what are the purposes of, kind of serving cultural memory
in cultural [inaudible].
And we started this work, a group of us,
actually started thinking about the creation of digital memorials,
in late 2000, right around the turn of the century, in 2001, we had an idea,
just a group of us who had worked at Xerox PARC,
we got laid off at Xerox PARC, we started a company
called Onomy Labs because we wanted to continue doing the design
and research work that we were doing.
Our tagline for Onomy Labs
was "Innovation that takes culture seriously",
that started with questions of culture
rather than questions of technology and one of the first projects
that we took on to start imagining was how could the technologies
that we were engaged in, a lot of smart furniture things
and so on, our reading devices, how could they serve
the mission and objectives of the Names Project Foundation
and in 2001 we prototyped a table top interactive browser
using one of the devices we built at PARC
to create the first, kind of like, spacialized browser,
for the AIDS Quilt.
We approached the Names Project Foundation, this is the foundation
that serves as the stewards for the Quilt,
we asked them if they would be willing to participate and partner with us,
and they said absolutely, this would be great but we have no money,
so you're on your own, and when you get money,
you can come back to us and then we'll allow you
to use our data sets but not until then. Perfectly reasonable response
for the non profit, that was at the time
having and still continues to have, struggles to keep it's doors open.
But they've been on, they've been a partner
conceptually and philosophically on this project since 2001,
and of course, we couldn't have done it without them.
As you know the Quilt Project and the Names Project Foundation
have very long history. It starts with, two people actually,
Mike Smith and Cleve Jones, who found the Names Project,
and then the Names Project Foundation in a small neighborhood
in San Francisco, the Castro district.
From the very early days of the public recognition
that people were dying of a set of diseases
that seemed more than coincidental.
So these aren't exactly the earliest days of HIV Aids,
it was certainly before we were just talking about that,
it was before we had returned.. (mobile phone rings)
Who's calling me in the middle of my talk?!
(laughter)
But this project that we kind of [inaudible] into now,
comes 25 years later, after the development,
the first kind of quilt panels were created,
and about 30 years after the public awareness of HIV Aids
as an international pandemic.
And I won't go into too much detail about the quilt,
but just to refresh everyone's memory.
So this is a quilt panel, quilt panels from those very early days
1986, the panels measured 3 feet by 6 feet,
which was, in some respects,
there were a series of very interesting accidents
that led to this understanding about quilting names,
putting names on these textile pieces but it is and was,
[inaudible] understood to be,
this is the form factor and size of a casket cover,
so it has, kind of from it's very early moments,
some understanding about reconfiguring our material
kind of monuments of memorialization.
So 3 feet by 6 feet are individual panels.
When the panels are submitted to the Names Project Foundation,
they are stitched together into blocks
that are 12 feet by 12 feet, so they are typically 8 panels per block.
So the size of the quilt, when we talk about the quilt,
the quilt is kind of quilted on several levels.
Its panels are quilted together into 12 foot by 12 foot blocks
and then the blocks are often displayed together
although they're not stitched together,
the blocks are often displayed in continuity with one another.
The first display, public display of the quilt,
happened in 1987.
It was to.. actually it was part of the march
on Washington for gay and lesbian rights and it was also
work of activism to lay the dead at the feet
of the law makers of Washington, who at that point,
were not taking seriously, the massive number of deaths happening
in what they thought at the time, was just California and New York.
I just want to tell a story about this. They were getting ready
to ship the quilt panels and the blocks
from California to Washington, to be part of the march on Washington,
the Names Project, the Foundation of Castro (group),
the workshop there, had just put out word,
to members of the castro, if you could get us your quilt panels
by September 16th, we will make sure that the quilt panels
are on the truck that is driving to Washington
that we're going to lay out.
And so because they had to rent a truck to take everybody out
they were organizing as a community group.
At 5 o'clock that day, the US post office
calls the Foundation and says "you'd better bring your truck"
and they were like "well, we're not going to load
the truck until tomorrow". They were thinking about loading,
it was an RV and they were going to take a whole group of people out,
and they were like "no, no, you need to bring your truck now,
because you have all these packages" and they were like "what packages?"
Because people, all day, had been bringing in panels
to the actual workshop so they didn't have the truck
but they got a Corvette, convertible, and they made seven trips
back and forth to the San Fransisco post office
picking up packages of quilt panels that had been shipped
from all over the country, to be included into the display
of the quilt, for the first time, before even anyone knew
what the size of it was going to be, for the march on Washington.
And that was before the internet.
And that was before our typical notions of social networking.
The word spread throughout the US through friendship networks,
kinship networks, partnerships and so on that people said
we want to create a quilt, a panel, on behalf of someone we've lost,
and they came in from all sorts of small towns around the US.
So I say that now and I use this example often
to remind people that social networking and viral marketing
and other kinds of cultural means, did not start with the internet.
But there were other kinds of social networks
that were actually very good about getting the word out
and not in ways that left traces of how the word traveled.
1996, it grew in a very short period of time.
1987 to 1996, from about 2000 panels to 40,000 panels.
This was the worst, kind of, time in terms of frequency
of death from HIV Aids. And so that was the last showing
of the quilt, 40,000 panels on the mall of Washington, 1996.
In 2006, to mark the 20 year anniversary, newspapers around the country
had headlines like this; "Quilt fades into obscurity"
although it was still in circulation. We had panels coming on average,
and still do, kind of, one panel a day.
By 2006, in the United States at least, people thought HIV and Aids
was a done deal, was no longer a death sentence,
that it had been early on and people were, of course, ignorant
about communities that were still greatly at risk for HIV Aids.
But there's a sense of which the day of the quilt had been done.
This headline really kind of gave us more energy to work
on our digital experiences
which we had done the design (fiction) and the prototype in 2001.
By 2006 we had worked for 5 years to try to get funding
to build these digital experiences and we got no traction.
We couldn't get any client, we couldn't get any funding,
we couldn't get any foundation. This was right before
the NEH, Office of Digital Humanities, starts,
so it was right before they were poised
to even receive proposals for this,
so in 2006 we redoubled our efforts to start looking for funding
to do these digital experiences or at least one digital experience.
And in fact what happened was we eventually got a digital start up grant
from the NEH to build a tangible browser
for the Aids Memorial Quilt based on the prototype
that we had done nine years earlier, but this time,
what had happened in the technology field, is that our, kind of one off,
interactive table that we had developed, called "the tilty table"
had given way to some consumer grade interactive pieces of furniture,
like Microsoft Surface, and IBM, at this point,
also had an interactive table so we knew we were going to be able to
do the tangible browser on a different display,
had technology [inaudible] the ones that we had developed.
So in 2012 and this is where we're going to turn the attention
to what we built and what we did. In 2012 this is the size
of the quilt now, 91,000 names plus, it's actually very difficult
to archive all the names, because some panels
have literally hundreds of names and it's unclear what the status
of those names, are they names of people who have died,
or names of the community members who have made the panel,
but about 91,000 names they have documented
of people who are memorialized.
There are almost 6000 blocks, those are the 12 by 12 foot pieces,
48,000 panels so you can see that the number of panels
have kind of slowed, in terms of the production,
over the last, now, 20 years. It weighs 34 tons.
34 tons of material culture is stored in a warehouse in Atlanta.
It is stored in a warehouse next to the headquarters
of the Names Project Foundation. There are three staff members.
It continues to circulate, continues to use a wider volunteer labor.
It is a textile work of material culture.
It is breaking down.
Stitches either come unraveled, these were not pieces
that were done by professional artists, for the most part,
or by professional quilt makers, so, kind of, the fragility
of the quilt in the [inaudible] is 34 tons is very obvious
whenever you see it. So what happens is of the 34 tons,
it is constantly opened up, restitched, so there's a constant
crew of staff who do nothing but keep the quilt,
literally, stitched together.
If it were spread out, it could be spread out,
in its entirety, it would cover almost 1.3 million square feet.
That would allow you to have space to walk in between the blocks
of 47 countries and this is when we started
really understanding perhaps a way to explore
what could the digital do that the textile couldn't do,
which is that it would take you 33 days if you only spent 1 minute
at each panel to view the entire quilt,
and there's no way a work of this magnitude
could ever be on display, one because we don't have big enough
spaces for it and second of all because of its fragility
in terms of it being laid out.
So...
in 2012 with the funding that came from the NEH
we embarked on a, what I call,
a distributed design research project that involved
digital humanists and cultural technologists.
It was my group in public interactives research
at the University of Southern California, the digital studio
for Arts and Humanities at the University of Iowa,
Andy van Dam's data visualization group
at Brown University and then Microsoft Research.
In contrast to what Donald may have suggested,
Microsoft Research came in at the eleventh hour
to provide some displays and funding
and so I had to really wrestle him to the ground
to, not only just dump technology on us, but to give us some money
to pay for people to use the technology.
I love them and I was very grateful for their help
but they don't understand that dumping technology
is not a panacea for doing digital humanities work.
You have to pay the people. So they did finally [inaudible]
with some funding, late in the game,
after many other institutions had come up with
and contributed extensive pro bono work.
Here are some of the challenges that we faced in this digital design project.
Absolutely noisy datasets. We had two datasets to work with.
The dataset of visual images. We have a visual data set
of each of the large block images. They are photographed over 25 years
meaning the earliest images were taken with analogue photography,
and then they were digitized afterwards. At the level of resolution
of 25 years it means different images, it's really kind of quite varied.
So we have a very noisy and inconsistent visual dataset
of these 58,000 large, or 5800 large, images that are 12 by 12 feet.
The metadata set is very noisy as well
because, again, 25 years of accessioning,
some people were entered in with nicknames only,
some people were entered in with full names,
some people were entered in with their nicknames
in quotation marks. So the metadata and the visual images
were challenging datasets and they were not integrated.
So you couldn't search the metadata for the demographic information
and get to a panel or get to a block and you couldn't search the panels
and the blocks to get to the metadata. So one of the very first things
we had to do was to get in under the hood
to look at these datasets and figure out
how we could clean them up to make them useable.
And then there's a whole other project about the lack
of digital tracking, for example, these 5800 blocks
do not have QR codes or any kind of bar coding on them.
They have a magic marker number for the block number
on the actual quilt panel which makes inventorying
the 34 tons of textile material very difficult.
So we were able, because we had some funding,
to come back to the Names Project, they allowed us to use these datasets
and start getting into the project of cleaning up the datasets,
both to help them and to service the project.
The work that I'm doing now, the reflective work,
is talking about this project as an experiment
in designing culture and exploring two concepts:
The poetics of interactivity and the architecture of public intimacy
and how the design of these particular digital experiences
kind of work out these two constructs, that I think are central to discourses
and conversations about digital humanities.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about
the three interactive experiences that we built
for the last display of the quilt in Washington.
This happened in summer of 2012. It was a six week event
called Quilt in the Capital.
I think I have slide about this... no skipped it..
So the quilt was first put out as part of the 4 day
Folk Life Festival sponsored by The Smithsonian.
Then the quilt was, quilt blocks, were distributed
to about 50 venues throughout the capital,
in the intervening 3 weeks. And then to coincide
with the International Conference on Aids,
which was happening in Washington DC
for the first time, since the Bush regime.
We attempted to lay out the quilt again on the mall of Washington
and that ended up not happening because, you guys probably remember this,
summer of 2012, I mean there was everything except an earthquake.
I mean we had floods, we had hurricanes, we had tornadoes,
I mean it was the worst possible summer. It was 106 degrees in the shade
and the humidity was through the roof and the days we were supposed to lay
this out on the mall it rained every single day.
So the quilt, the physical quilt itself, that was it's moment,
it will never go out again in public.
If it was going to happen it would have happened in summer 2012
and we just, we literally got to the end of the logistics
that could make that happen, we now understand.
So for a good portion of the 6 weeks that the quilt was in the capital,
the digital experiences were the only access to the Aids Memorial Quilt.
The quilt was there. If we could find a panel
and the panel maker came in, we would bring the panel out
and we would lay it out in our tent that we had
and we ended up turning these digital experiences,
which were meant to augment viewing of the textile quilt,
we ended up turning them into a media system
for quilt archaeology.
People would come in and say "My uncle Steve has a panel"
and we're like Ok what's Steve's last name?
When did he die etc and it was through the interactive experience
and I'll show you some facsimiles of these, that we would help people
get to the actual panel and then work backwards
to getting to the block and then work backwards
to where in all the cargo containers that were along the mall
might that panel be stored so we can bring the panel,
or bring the block out to show people.
Who had traveled from Alaska, Texas and so on
to see these panels.
We ended up building the three interactives,
I can't show you this one, I'll show you a facsimile of this,
so we did use Microsoft, what was then called Surface,
interactive table top browser to create a searchable
and, kind of, viewable
interaction, interactive experience where you could view the quilt
from different levels of altitude.
These were the tables in the tent.
The team, the docent team.
We didn't do any formal user research
because that was not really the point of this project
but people came, they looked, they watched, they searched,
they stayed for a half hour, an hour at a time
and again we ended up doing these things called quilt archaeology
working in one question and experience
would lead to another to another.
There was a list of names that you could browse.
You could browse by image, you could browse by name,
you could get metadata, you could go between selecting the panel
and get the metadata associated with that.
If you were to browse the list of names,
it took 500 screens, to browse,
so there were some browsing techniques to get you able to shorthand.
We asked the question, we were interested in,
what is the, what's the equivalent of a digital rubbing
for a digital memorial?
We know that, certainly in the context of the national mall,
that a lot of the way in which people interact,
with the marble and the carved pieces and so on
and this was an unexpected, kind of,
practice that we noted, that people would find the panel
and then they would take a digital image of people at the table of the panel
and so there was something, again, to be explored here,
kind of how, the digital enables people to be witnesses
and to be present at a moment in time.
Some amazing and very unusual stories were evoked by this.
This is a panel for a young man named Chris Parcell
and he died in 1990, but in 1989,
a photojournalist named Billy Howard, had done a book,
a photojournalist book with some entries
on men who were diagnosed as HIV positive
who were in the Castro district and Billy was coming over
and he said I'd like to look up the people who are in my book.
And so we were looking up the various names, about 50 names in the book,
and 50 photographs and Billy hadn't realized that
Chris' panel was a quilted version of the photograph that Billy had taken
of Chris and it included the clothes that Chris was wearing
in the photograph. So those kinds of stories
that we wouldn't have seen otherwise
because we wouldn't have been able to have a mechanism
to get in and browse so precisely.
Some of the unexpected encounters
and what we also realized, of course, in doing this work,
unlike many of the other digital pieces I've been involved with,
it's very much about using the digital to be present with people
as they were remembering things and to be a part of the witnessing
of the, kind of, cultural memories.
Second project that we did, that is kind of on and off,
in terms of whether or not it's still available on Microsoft's site,
because we used a new Microsoft program called Chronozoom
to create an interactive timeline of the history
of HIV Aids, that research and those stories,
and that kind of interactive timeline about the history of the quilt.
This was a very interesting opportunity for me to get involved
and deep in discussions with researchers at Microsoft about
some of the nuances of historiography
and, like, this is so wrong on so many counts,
that this Chronozoom is so wrong
because it really is well suited to telling the stories
of epics and epochs and geologic times and so on,
such that it ended up making AIDS seem like an eyeblink
in the history of humanity.
And I'm like we'll do it, but I'm not happy about doing it
and I'm going to show you why.
It's because every time you turn around, you can zoom out so quickly
to the geologic time frame that anything that has to do with humanities
seems absolutely insignificant.
So helping them understand that perhaps they needed some breaks
on those zooming capacities on different timelines.
We had interesting discussions about
how one writes history.
Aids Quilt Touch. This was probably our most successful,
kind of unintended consequence. Very late in the day
the Digital Studio for the Public Humanities at Iowa
said you know, you need a mobile web app,
everyone's going to show up at the mall
and they're going to want to know where on the google map
is the panel that they're looking for and we're like,
wow, we don't have any funding to do that and the Iowa team said we'll do it.
And so in about 4 weeks they built a very robust
mobile web app that is still up
and available and I'll show you that.
So I'd like to show you just a few of the experiences here.
Let me start with..
let me start with this one. So this will give you a sense
of what you could do, this is what I mean by
the poetics of interactivity. So this is a virtual image
of 1.3 million square feet, almost 6000 12 by 12 blocks.
There's no scale markers on here.
This is also the first time when we did this,
this is the first time, that the quilt block panels
were laid out in chronological order.
So that means that they're by accessioning numbers, 0001, 0002..
it doesn't entirely correspond to the chronology
of when the panels were created because also what we learned
is that people hold onto the panels until they're ready to let go.
And so down here you may have panels that were created 25 years ago
that would have been up there but weren't submitted at the same age
but at least for the way in which the panels
were brought to the Names Project, stitched into the blocks
and then accessioned, this is a historical document.
And a document where you can start to see the difference
in resolution. So at the table
that you were at in, one of the surface,
you would be able to do this kind of zooming
just by gesture-based and it's pretty fast,
it's pretty fast, you could pan,
you could pan across, zoom in at different altitudes
to the point where you would get to a resolution
focused on a singular panel.
This project, to create that very smooth, kind of, zooming from different altitudes
of viewing brought the computers to its knees.
This was the Brown group working furiously
to make a Microsoft deep zoom application
able to handle the size of the images.
Because this is 1.3 million square feet.
This is not, so there were different kinds of hacks
and work arounds and stuff like that.
We really had the best thinkers...
So at the table, you would have been able to,
with gestures zoom in and out to different altitudes,
you could pan around, you could start to see patterns and so on,
but if you were at the table you would be able to click
on a particular panel and then get the metadata
for that panel so you were able to go from,
and this is one of the examples of what I mean by poetics of interactivity.
This is something the digital could do that wasn't able to be done
on the textile which is that you could zoom
from the, most, bird's eye view of these large displays at this scale,
down to the 3 by 5, 3 by 6 panel.
To give you, kind of, a sense of the oscillation
between the personal and the cultural.
The significance of Aids is certainly about every name
that's on the panel, the most intimate
and the most, literally, kind of, signature experience.
But for us, culturally, the impact of HIV Aids
is arrayed by this, apprehending this scale of the image
and that table, that interactive table
enabled people, literally, to go very seamlessly
from the individual signature name to the sense of the scale of the project.
I'll just show you the Aids Quilt Touch.
So this is still up and running although it's definitely,
it's not even in beta, some of the things that we did
and this is, kind of, the going in point, we were interested in
being able to map for people where a particular
where a particular panel is going to be located on the mall
so it's really a google map mash up.
(brief silence)
And so this is what I mean when I say the database
was really noisy, this is what we have:
We have "Bambi" for an entry without really reliable
secondary metadata so the kind of things we have to do
to clean up this database, requires going back
into the physical archives.
(brief silence)
Anyway, so there is kind of a mash up of where the displays are.
And then this was the first time that the Names Project Foundation
had any sort of digital guest book.
So what we invited, what we invited people to do,
so here was something that was, ...a year after,
this was a celebration for this person
and it's submitted by somebody named by David Julio
and it's a testimony to somebody, his friend named Michael,
who was an important part of his life in 1979.
So this is now the first time that the Names Project
had the capacity to invite people to submit anything
from simple memorials to stories. This is what we are now hoping to do
in the next phase of the project which is to create
a much more multi media rich and multi modal
kind of story, story engine or story accessing engine.
And building off of the notion that you could celebrate
individual people, you could share your thoughts
about the quilt itself and there were certainly
a number of...
a number of contributions from people saying
I had no idea the quilt was so big so people who didn't have experience
with a particular name but was talking about
the significance of the quilt.
So I'm just going to talk about two other, maybe more wonky, things,
that digital humanists in the room will understand and appreciate.
So one of the struggles that we had
was we only have images of the 12 by 12 foot blocks.
We don't have images of the individual panels.
They didn't decide to do that imaging, they only imaged the block.
But for researching and for searching
we would really like to be able to get people
to return all the panels for a particular name
or we would like to do parameter based searching,
like I would like to know How many panels are submitted
on behalf of people who died who have my birth date
so that I can understand who's my cohort
on the quilt and their children, what year they died and so on.
I'm actually in the middle of the demographics
in terms of who was susceptible to this.
So we did community sourcing application, very down and dirty,
that just puts a block on the screen
and then asks you to click on the number
that is most closely at the center of an individual panel
and then we also ask people does this image need to be cropped?
Which this one does... so I'm going to say yes,
it's a little kind of ugly there and then you submit
the block layout. So what we're doing,
we're almost near the end of going through all the blocks,
times 3 to get inter...reliability, inter reliability,
so that now we know where on a block,
is the location of an individual panel.
Because there are actually 32 different permutations
of 8 panels for each block, some blocks are all 1 panel, 12 by 12.
This was one where Andy and Dan said you should be able to do this
algorithmically and Andy said to us, you're better off with human eyeballs.
And it has to do with the imprecision of the colors,
because we have such, the capacity to really discern,
to make distinctions between textile, even in bad resolution images.
So what we're aiming for, and this is another thing
we've got in beta, we're aiming for,
again we've got the proof of concept for the ability
to recreate the virtual quilt, not for presentation and display,
but for research so you can do parameter based searching
and get a collection of the quilt panels
that represent the parameters. So like I just typed in
"creation date 1992", so this would be the collection
of panels, this is a sample data set,
but the collection of panels that were submitted in 1992.
Take that out...
We know that people want to do things like
panels, where are the panels submitted associated with a particular city,
zipcode, things like that.
I think this is going to be a very interesting
set of research capabilities when we can get this done
because there is so many interesting, so many interesting patterns
that we can now start to see in the quilt,
including quilting patterns which we're connecting
up with the people at Michigan State University
who do the quilt index. So to also put the quilt
into yet another context, which is a folkal part context.
It is one of the largest pieces of quilt folk art in the history of the world
as far as we know.
So it would be a way, this kind of capacity,
it would be a way in which we would enable the datasets
to be searchable for cultural questions,
not data analytical questions and so I use this as an example
of what I mean when I say "cultural analytics".
That it's about searching for patterns that the data by itself can't reveal.
That if I just had access to one set or the other
I wouldn't be able to get at them, I can only get them
if I can do something different with the data.
That is, those are our examples. I'm not going to show Chronozoom
because Chronozoom is down right now.
I think the lessons learned here were that it literally,
it literally takes a village, or rather, this to me was an example
of the thing, the construct I've been working on,
this is something you guys were starting to talk about,
the construct of a, kind of, big humanities project,
like the big science project that enabled us
to do the [inaudible] sequencing.
This is the kind of cultural phenomena that cannot be done
by any single institution. It's 34 tons.
The Smithsonian can't take it, the Library of Congress,
is literally daunted by this, so we've got to think about
an entirely different way of archiving the physical pieces,
thinking about the role of the digital and maintaining the integrity
of the physical archive.
We're talking about shifting from, you know, putting it somewhere
permanently, to repatriating the quilt, and putting the quilt
back to the cultural institutions that are already vested in the project
of keeping the memory of HIV Aids, gay and lesbian history alive.
So repatriating the physical quilt and using the digital platforms
to do the work of maintaining the integrity.
So we're just starting to have these conversations
between the Names Project Foundation and the Library of Congress
to try to understand what's the mechanisms
for doing this.
So I use it as an example of a big digital humanities project.
It's too big for any single institution or any single set of researchers
and what it means is it's more of a consortium
or a collaboration model that divides the labor.
So thank you. I think that's my time.