Anne Balsamo Digital Dialogue: 'Heavy Data, Cultural Memories: Lessons from the AIDS Memorial Quilt Digital Experience Project'

Anne Balsamo, Dean and Professor of Media Studies
The New School for Public Engagement
@annebalsamo

MITH Conference Room
Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 12:30 pm

“Epidemics, like wars, mark a generation for life.”

The AIDS Memorial Quilt was created 25 years ago as a work of community activism to protest the appalling lack of attention by the US health agencies to what was then, in 1987, an increase in improbable fatalities among previously healthy gay men in the United States. Its first inception unfolded in October 1987 on the National Mall in Washington DC as part of the March for Gay Rights; it included 1,920 Quilt panels. Now 25 years later, the Quilt encompasses more than 48,000 panels, representing 60 countries and commemorating more than 93,000 names. It is the largest living memorial of its kind in the world.

The Quilt is also an “activist archive” of the late 20th century. The activities that gave rise to the Quilt in 1987 are part of the history of the campaign for gay and lesbian rights in the US. The Quilt literally stitches together a million memories, a million stories, a million lessons about the relationship between individual lives, public culture, and political activism. In its textile form, it is an unwieldy archive. If laid out in its entirety the Quilt would cover more than 1.3 million square feet. It weighs more than 34 tons.

This presentation discusses the creation of an interactive memorial that was designed to augment the viewing of the textile Quilt. I will demonstrate three digital experiences: 1) an open-source mobile web application called AIDS QUILT TOUCH; 2) a tangible tabletop interactive that enables viewers to SEARCH the database of Quilt images to find a specific image and to BROWSE the archive of Quilt panel images; and 3) a community sourcing application that engages people in analyzing and archiving information about the Quilt.

This effort is framed by my recent transmedia book project called Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination At Work. In creating the Quilt Digital Experiences I was interested in exploring the cultural work of public interactives, to examine how they are implicated in practices of cultural reproduction—remembering, witnessing, archiving, and educating.

(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.