Introduction

For my midterm project, I decided to create a web map that plotted the different artworks from Tate’s collection from 1950-55 by non-UK artists born between 1900-1919. I used ArcGIS to plot where the artists were born and added a pop-up that displayed the artists’ pieces. In the map, the more vivid the plot point, the more artworks there are that were made by an artist from that location. This could mean there are multiple artists that have the same birthplace, there are multiple artworks by a singular person from a specific birthplace, or in some cases, it means both!

Sources

I used both Tate datasets, the one that lists information about Tate artworks from 1950-1955 and the one that lists information about Tate artists that were born between 1900-1919. I used OpenRefine to exclude any artworks from the first dataset that were not made by artists from the second dataset. Then, I created a new column in the artwork dataset that included the artists’ places of birth and deleted any row that had blanks in that column. 

Afterwards, I cleaned the data even more on Google Sheets. I realized that the thumbnail images in the dataset were not working, so I added new links to the dataset. Then, I deleted any artworks that did not have an image or had links to artworks that did not exist on the website.

This is my final dataset!

Process

After I cleaned my data, I created a web map using ArcGIS online. I set the location of the plot points using the birthplace column. Then, I changed the popups to include an image of the artwork, the copyright associated with the image, and a small blurb with the title, artist, and artist’s birthplace of the artwork.

For stylistic changes, I changed the style of the plot points so that the viewer can see if there are multiple artworks by artists from that place of birth. I used the Painterly base map by John Nelson to enforce the theme of art in my project.

Presentation

After I was finished creating my web map, I created a web app so I could easily embed my map into my midterm subdomain website. When embedding my map, I had to adjust the HTML so that the map had a width of 600 and a height of 400 and was centered on the page so that it is easier for the user to interact with the map.

Significance

When looking at the web map, the viewer can see where the Tate museum sources their artworks if they are not collecting art specifically from the UK. It is important to note that most of the art that is not locally sourced is from Europe and the United States. Thus, Tate might have a skewed or more westernized view of art from the early 1950s. However, it is important to note that not all artworks from the original dataset were visualized, since the birthplace of the artists are not known from the two datasets for those specific pieces. Also, I chose to only visualize artworks that had an image to show, which also could have skewed the results in some way.

Data Visualization