Dr. Anne Balsamo spoke to a crowd of about 15 in the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities in Hornbake library about her work in digital media on Tuesday, Feb. 18th
A leader in media studies spoke yesterday about her work in using new technologies to preserve a piece of cultural history.
Anne Balsamo spoke to a group of about 20 graduate students and professors in Hornbake Library about her work in the digital humanities, detailing her recent project to digitize the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a traveling charity display that memorializes AIDS victims. The talk was part of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities’ “Digital Dialogues” series.
With experience in both academia and Silicon Valley, Balsamo said, she wanted to find a way to use the latest technologies available for a massive cultural project. That’s where the AIDS Memorial Quilt came in.
Since 1987, the NAMES Project has collected tens of thousands of colorful quilt panels, each one commemorating a person who died of AIDS-related causes, Balsamo said. Friends and family members make the panels and bring them to the foundation, where they are quilted into larger 12-square-foot blocks and collectively called the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
The more than 34 tons of the blocks — a surface area of 1,283,900 square feet, enough to cover 47 countries — represent a cultural movement to raise awareness of AIDS and to remember those lost, Balsamo said. Because the blocks are made of fabric that can break down, however, and because of their huge size, it is no longer practical to display them.
The last time the quilt was displayed in public was at a summertime event in Washington, D.C. in 2012. Balsamo said it likely wouldn’t be physically displayed again but will still be available to view as Balsamo, the NAMES Project, Microsoft, the University of Southern California and others work to digitize it.
After inventory and data collection, Balsamo and others reproduced the quilt digitally and displayed it on screens on the National Mall at 2012’s event, so visitors could see the whole project at once and search for individual panels.
“People would come in and say, ‘My uncle Steve has a panel,’ and we would ask what his last name was when he died,” Balsamo said, saying the team could then locate the specific panel on a screen. Sometimes, they could direct viewers to the panel’s physical location on the Mall.
“People have been so grateful to find what really is a needle in a haystack,” Balsamo said.
Visitors took pictures of themselves gathered around the digital displays of the quilt in a way that reminded Balsamo of tourists rubbing their hands against monuments, she said.
Although digitizing the quilt was a feat, Balsamo experienced the limits of technology firsthand, she said. She had hoped the use of Microsoft ChronoZoom technology, which allowed viewers to zoom in and out along a timeline, would give a sense of “the oscillation between individual and the communal”; however, because users could zoom so far out on the timeline, it ended up making “AIDS seem like an eyeblink in human history,” she said. The team is working on refining the technology.
In addition, technology can’t do all the work. The blocks are made up of individual panels sewn together, each representing a different person, but an algorithm can’t distinguish separate panels, resulting in project workers doing much of the archiving manually.
Still, the NAMES Project has come a long way since its initial days of transporting the blocks across the country in trucks — what Balsamo called a pre-Internet “social network” of friends and families — and Balsamo said the digitization is critical because the physical quilt is not usually accessible to the public.
“The digital allows people to be witnesses and experience a particular moment in time,” she said.
Dan Greene, an American Studies doctoral candidate, said he attends Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities events regularly but had a particular interest in Balsamo and the NAMES Project.
“I like how this was a big humanities project; how she said it was as big and important assomething like the Human Genome Project,” he said.
Melissa Rogers, a doctoral candidate in women’s studies, said Balsamo’s work could provide inspiration for students and researchers.
“What’s really interesting to me is thinking how students can be involved in something like this,” she said. “I can really see this integrating into a service project or working in the classroom environment.”
