The aim of this project is to analyze if there is any trend in the geographical distribution of the Tate artists’ born place. Since many historically important events happened in the period from 1930 to 1949, it might be interesting to consider whether the production of works of art align with the development around the world and find out the center of art at the time. I decided to use web mapping to visualize the geographical distribution since it is the most straightforward way. The result shows that the majority of the artists were born in Europe and the Eastern part of the United States.

Sources

This dataset contains the personal information of Tate artists who were born between the year of 1930 and 1949, including their name, gender, year of birth, year of death, place of birth, place of death, and the date when their artworks were collected by the Tate gallery. Tate is an institution that houses the national collections of art of the United Kingdom, which range from international modern art to contemporary art. I edit the CSV file in Excel to delete any row that has an empty cell in the column of the place of birth.

Process

In ArcGIS, I first imported the cleaned CSV file by adding a layer from the file. Then I selected the fields that would be displayed on the web map by clicking on each mark. I chose to use the column of the place of birth as the location since it represents the cultural background of the artists. I can use this as a reference to make connections between the historical background and the production of art. I edited the style of the mark so that the distribution can be clearly seen. To embed the web map in this website, I converted it to an instant web app, and the app generated an HTML link for me to embed it. 

Presentation

I decided to use WordPress to present this midterm project since this is the platform that I am the most familiar with. I embedded the web map at the top of the page so that audiences can get a sense of what my project is about by exploring the interactive and intuitive map. I split my description into different sections with a title to indicate what each section is about and make it easy to read. I also customized the appearance of this site to make it unique.

Significance

Web mapping allows us to identify patterns and trends that may not be immediately apparent when we simply look at the raw data. By mapping the birthplaces of these artists, we can gain insight into the cultural and artistic movements that emerged in different regions during the time period from 1930 to 1949. For example, the result shows the clusters of artists from certain areas, which could indicate the possible presence of influential art communities. Additionally, this can be a valuable tool for people who are interested in studying the impact of a specific time period on art history. Overall, this project has the potential to reveal new insights and deepen our understanding of the relationships between art, culture, and geography. Unlike data science, which may focus primarily on analyzing data to develop predictive models, DGAH are more concerned with using technology to enhance our understanding of culture, history, and the arts.