HIV and AIDS Archives Symposium: Panel Four - Digital and creative approaches

The National Archives holds an extensive collection of material related to the HIV and AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. But these records tell a limited story of the spread of HIV in the UK. As official documents of the state, they rarely convey anything of the lived experiences and emotions of people who lived with or in proximity to the virus. Such histories are often preserved elsewhere, by voluntary groups and in community archives. Though they offer different takes on historical facts, both are necessary and valuable.

Speakers:

Positively Spoken: creative outputs from HIV youth oral histories, Wendy Rickard, Associate Researcher, Newcastle University

Wendy Rickard is a UK oral historian best known for her work around HIV and AIDS and sex work. She is an Associate Researcher at the School of History, Classics & Archaeology, Newcastle University and has a long-standing relationship with the British Library Sound Archive (BLSA). Her wider career has been in public health with a particular interest in
community engagement and shared authority (University of East London, LSE, South Bank University and University of Exeter).

Transformation, loss, recovery and usability: The life and times of the AIDS Advertising Evaluation Dataset, Bernard Ogden, Digital Researcher, The National Archives

Bernard Ogden is a Digital Researcher at The National Archives, working with a range of digital methods within various research projects. Among other things, he is interested in questions around robustness, reproducibility and usability in humanities datasets, and in how digital
interfaces and data visualisations can be used to interrogate historical questions from new angles.

UK AIDS memorial quilt: a living memorial, Siobhán Lanigan and Clifford McManus, The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Partnership

Created in 2016, continuing the work initiated by Alistair Hulme in the late ‘80s, today the UK AIDS memorial quilt Partnership is made up of 7 UK based HIV charities: Waverly Care in Edinburgh; Sahir in Liverpool; George House Trust in Manchester and Terrence Higgins Trust, Positive East, Positively UK and The Food Chain in London. Siobhán Lanigan has been
involved with the partnership since its creation; Clifford McManus since 2017. Both worked for The Food Chain and since retirement, are involved with the partnership on a voluntary basis.

The Ministerial Broadcast: from archive to stage, David Balcombe, playwright

David Balcombe is the Founder and Director of Verity. He was a leading member of the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and studied drama at the University of Manchester. David enjoyed a long career in arts management, at the helm of three of the country's foremost training companies: the National Youth Theatre, Chickenshed Theatre
Company and British Youth Opera. Since 2018 David has been focusing on writing and developing projects, as well as becoming heavily involved in his local community in his adopted county of East Devon. He is co-chair of Exeter Northcott Theatre