SAAM API Artists

The SAAM API Artists Project extrapolates demographic data from the American Art API in the hopes of illuminating the work of under represented artists. Using the .get request I gathered information from the API (GetSAAMData.py) and transformed it into structured data (SAAMFinal.py). The next step in my project was an attempt to gather ethnicity or racial demographic data from each African American artist using their ULAN ID number. The ImportULANd.py file gathers each artists ULAN file and searches for ethnicity information under the Nationality predicate. However, my attempts proved unsuccessful as ethnicity and nationality are conflated in the ULAN database, as American is listed as the primary nationality for almost all African American Artists. African American Artists’ race is denoted as “nationalityNonPreferred†and is therefore nested within the data structure and difficult to gather. My work-around for this problem, was using the artists WikiData ID and the data reconciliation tool OpenRefine to extract “ethnic group” data..