Midterm

1. Introduction to the project

For my midterm project, I decided to create a visualization of the places of origin of the Tate artists from 1900 to 1920. The dataset contains the names, gender, places of birth and death, birth years, and URL to their famous work.   Among these different data, I thought it would be interesting to see how the places of origin differ and if there is any correlation between their artwork and the places of origin. Using ArcGIS Online tool, the results are visualized through an interactive map, with information about the artists, including their artwork.

2. Sources

I used the Tate artwork data 1900-1920 csv file. It contains the id, name, gender, dates, years of birth and death, places of birth and death, and url to their artworks. Since I wanted to focus on their places of birth, I decided to delete the id, years of birth and death, and places of death columns. Then, I deleted the 30 artists with unknown places of birth to avoid any errors in my map. Also, I sorted the names alphabetically, but I don’t think that would matter that much since I’m making a map.

This is the data set I used

And this is the cleaned data set

3. Processes 

Once cleaned, I used ArcGIS Online to make a map. I thought this was the perfect tool for showing different origins of the artists as it offers an easy way to add, store, and visualize spatial data. Without having to mark all the places by myself, ArcGIS Online analyzed the text data and created a nice map. Since I wanted the map to be more focused on geological data, I added another layer of labels under the places of birth to show each artist’s name when zoomed in. Then I added saturate effect to the symbols to make sure they stand out. When you click on the dots, a little pop-up window shows. It contains the artist’s name, gender, place of birth, year of birth, and a URL to the collection of the famous work. 

4. Presentation 

I used multiple WordPress blocks to organize content clearly and make the visualizations interactive. I added paragraph blocks to provide context and descriptions for each section of the project. Then I used a custom HTML block to embed the map, using the HTML export code from ArcGIS. The combination of these blocks allows the page to be both informative and visually engaging, presenting the results in a structured format.

5. Significance

This project demonstrates how digital humanities approaches can illuminate datasets by finding geological patterns that may not be apparent through the dataset alone. By mapping the data, people can categorize the artists by their places of birth and explore their artworks in a new way, leading to a better understanding of the Tate artists. This kind of DH approach emphasizes interpretation, context, and humanistic understanding.