For my midterm, I decided to analyze the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA)’s decorative arts dataset. To narrow my focus and tell a story through the data, I created a data visualization that shows the abundance of varying types of art from the 16th through 20th centuries that are housed at WCMA.
Sources
My source for this project was WCMA’s decorative arts dataset. While this dataset included a lot of information, I only ended up using the creation data and object type columns from the collection.
Processes
This mini project required quite a bit of data cleaning and trimming. I knew that I wanted to compare types of art by century, not specific year, in order to understand the popularity of certain mediums over long periods of history. To do this, I went through the creation data column in the data set and changed all of the year dates to their century equivalents. I also deleted any rows in the data that had no recorded creation date or had a creation date range that spanned more than one century to maximize simplicity and conciseness. Finally, I deleted any rows in the data that had a creation data not in the range of the 16th through 20th centuries. I did this because the data set contained a few outliers with really ancient or more modern creation dates that weren’t prevalent enough to add to the overall meaning of the data visualization.
Presentation
I played around with a few different types of data visualizations before deciding on the tree map above. I explored rawgraphs.io a little bit, but their visualization options seemed a little industrial looking, and I wasn’t into that. Instead, I used Flourish, which provides much more attractive visualizations that are more conducive to storytelling. Within Flourish, I experimented with the sunburst and radial designs, but I decided that the tree map allowed the most amount of data to be presented in a readable, digestible way.
Significance
My data set guides the viewer towards understanding what types of art were more prevalent in certain centuries. For example, according to the art collection housed at WCMA, material from books was very popular in the 20th century, while furniture seemed to be a rather consistent form of art in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Understanding art in this way can give us insight into how cultures preferred to express their ideas and feelings throughout history. Obviously this project is not a generalization of the popularity of certain types of art throughout the centuries because it only relies on one data set from one specific museum, but it is still an interesting peek into art history. This project relates to digital humanities in general because it uses data to teach us something about humanity, people, and culture, which is the aim of any good DH project. DH revolves around the idea of presenting data in a way that tells a story about humans and their lives or tendencies, and I think this project does the same.
