Week 3: Riley

My chosen project: The AIDs Memorial Quilt

URL: www.aidsmemorial.org/interactive-aids-quilt 

This source is a digitized version of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, as well as the stories of many people represented on it. As a brief overview, the AIDs Memorial Quilt is a 50,000-panel quilt with the names of over 100,000 people who passed away from AIDs, created by loved ones and activists and displayed in Washington, D.C. in 1987. It’s interactive, and people are able to search the names of people on it. It’s also a digital archive of the history surrounding the quilt and AIDs activism and memorialization in general. It includes sections on specific individuals, telling their life stories. 

According to their “About” page, the AIDS Memorial Quilt (and ostensibly the online memorial as well) belongs to/is under the responsibility of the National AIDs Memorial, which was signed into law by Nancy Pelosi in 1996 to commemorate those who died of AIDs, as well as raise awareness to current and future generations about the disease and its effects on peoples’ lives. They have a page listing their board members, as well as one listing their staff. Both pages include paragraphs about each person, their background and expertise, and often their personal connection to this topic. As for funding, they state: “The National AIDS Memorial relies solely on funding from personal donors and corporate partners to support its mission and programs.” (“The Memorial,” accessed September 6, 2025, https://www.aidsmemorial.org/the-memorial.) There is a section on the website where visitors can donate. 

The intended audience is, in theory, everyone. HIV/AIDs, can affect anyone, regardless of demographic, and part of the National AIDs Memorial’s mission is to raise awareness. One particular audience that this online memorial benefits, however, are those who have loved ones whose names are represented on the AIDs Quilt. There is a section on the website where loved ones can search for specific names on the quilt in order to see a deceased loved one’s square. What I found most interesting as a visitor is that there is a page where it instructs visitors how to make their own quilt panels to honor a loved one who has passed away from AIDs. There is then information on how/where they can send the panel for it to be added to the quilt. That makes this project very much a living, ongoing one that is, theoretically, about as open-sourced as one can get, as people from all over the country continuously send in more panels (“Make an AIDS Quilt Panel,” accessed September 9, 2025, https://www.aidsmemorial.org/make-a-panel.)

The only data that I could see when I “inspected” the website was HTML. I was able to download and reuse the dataset in Word! However, the formatting was off, and many of the images appeared as links when I tried to open it in Word. However, I think with some editing I would be able to recreate a lot of the webpage. I was also able to download and paste in WordPress, but ironically, the links and images worked much better on there than on Word, but the rest of the code was still just in “code” format.

The scholarly purpose of this resource is that it also exists as an archive for the personal stories of people, some of them activists, during the height of the AIDs crisis. One particularly impactful and informative section is titled “Racism, Bigotry, and AIDs Activism”, and shines a special light on people of color, transgender people, and especially transgender people of color who have been affected and continue to be affected by AIDs today. There are three subsections titled the Asian and Pacific Islander Community, the Transgender Community, and Black Lives Matter for more information on how AIDs has impacted A&PI, trans, and black people respectively. The first two sections include over 10 videos each of videos of Asian, Pacific Islander, and transgender individuals discussing their experiences and the impact that HIV/AIDs has had on their lives. The third section, Black Lives Matter, is titled such because it’s dedicated to six Black lives that appear on the AIDs Quilt. They highlighted these particular stories as part of their statement that “The story of the AIDS epidemic is the story of black and brown people.”, as their communities have been disproportionately impacted and ignored (“Racism, Bigotry & Activism,” accessed September 8, 2025, https://www.aidsmemorial.org/racism-bigotry-activism#BLM.).

This page exists as a great resource for anyone doing scholarly research on how HIV/AIDs has and does affect different minorities, as well as how different aspects of identity such as race, sexuality, and gender can affect experiences of oppression and erasure in America. It also exists as a great resource for any historian doing research on a specific person whom they know passed away from AIDs during this time and may appear on the quilt. Being able to see their square, the images that their loved ones prioritized to represent them on the quilt, can give a researcher a better idea of how the people around them viewed them, which adds more depth to a biography.

As there are over 100,000 names on the quilt, there is no list of names one can consult, but the project is designed to easily navigate the quilt. Researchers can literally enter a name into the search bar, and red ribbons appear on the quilt to indicate what panels the names can be found on. The only research limitation that I really ran into is that many of the panels have a lot of names on them, since there are multiple quilt squares on each one; therefore, even if the panel is lit up, it may still take you a minute to find the person’s name on it. While looking at the different panels of the quilt, I noticed that a lot of the people on them were listed as “activists” or grouped in with an activist group. It could be interesting for someone to work backwards from there to find more information on the small, local activist groups that appear on so many of the panels.

I personally think that this is a really well-done project, which makes sense considering it’s under the responsibility of a large, national organization dedicated to AIDs Memorialization. I’m not sure anything that could be done differently than what they’ve done here; the panels are scanned in in very good quality, and the search tool makes it incredibly easy to find a specific person, whether one is doing academic or personal research. This artifact–the AIDs Memorial Quilt–is symbolic of a loss of life on a near unimaginable scale, and as I looked through different panels I was struck by the countless names, images, and messages of mourning. This is a very emotionally heavy project to be responsible for, and I think that the National AIDs Memorial has treated it with the weight and respect that is needed. Beyond that, they’ve made it incredibly user-friendly, which is good especially for this project. I can imagine someone who doesn’t explore Digital Humanities projects usually but wants to look up the panel of a deceased loved one; the search process needs to be accessible to anyone who comes to the site, and I feel like they’ve done so. They’ve even included a page explaining the search process for reference.

I think that this is an incredibly well-done project, and it taught me not only more of the history of the AIDs Quilt, but also the ongoing memorialization of those who have passed from AIDs and the current activism surrounding this issue.