AIDS has radically transformed the world and become the focus of interdisciplinary study and research from a medical, cultural, and media-historical perspective. Over the past 30 years, the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden has collected numerous items –predominantly posters– which have been used in the media campaign to combat the epidemic. It is the world’s largest collection of AIDS posters with over 9,000 specimens from 147 countries. Much of the collection has been classified using the ICONCLASS system. Each record captures the date, language, ICONCLASS classification number, keywords, and geographic data for a given media object.
ICONCLASS is an iconographic classification system which assigns unique codes to common subjects in Western art. ICONCLASS is a hierarchical classification that uses alphanumeric codes divided among 10 major classes.
THE GOAL of the project is to visualize the distribution of symbols, gestures, and topics addressed in the posters through space and time so that other researchers and members of the public can understand the development of the cultural response to the AIDS epidemic.