In 2016, The Metropolitan Museum of Art uploaded a 200+ MB file to Github simply titled ‘MetObjects.csv.’ Inside contained over 406,000 records of objects within The Met’s collection. Over the past few years, this number has steadily increased to 446,934 objects listed. The Museum has placed a chunk of its art, and its accompanying records, into the hands of the internet. Including myself, who had a chance to rummage through the ‘MetObjects’ and came out with a deeper understanding of the Museum’s Egyptian Art collection.
Tools Used
The main data visualization software used was Tableau Public, which allows non-paid users to post and share data charts and dashboards online. In addition to Tableau I used Microsoft Excel a few times to view the data within a traditional data table. I also used The Met’s Open Access dataset available through Github, and I referred to The Met’s API term list from 2016 for understanding certain metrics used within the Github .csv file.
Methods and Process
I struggled with picking out a dataset to use. I switched between New York demographics, Spotify chart data, and toy industry sales. As a student in the Museums & Digital Culture program, I decided to my focus towards finding data related to museums. While searching around for a potential source, I remembered The Met’s push to share its collection data. I searched for the Github account and downloaded the recently updated .csv file. With over 460,000 objects recorded, I had trouble deciding on what story to tell with the dataset. While still trying to understand the data, I discovered that the records contained metrics for accession years and excavations. An accession year is the date when an object was acquired by the Museum and placed in its collection, and an excavation is the act of unearthing potential artifacts by removing rubble and soil. A majority of the objects that had been excavated originated from Egypt. Excavations for objects within the Egyptian Art department make up 99.6% of all excavations recorded in the dataset (15,973 out of 16,034 excavations).
While viewing data that only pertained to the Egyptian Art department, I remembered an article that I had read a few months ago. Titled “An Excavation Of One Of The World’s Greatest Art Collections”, this article detailed the launch of The Met’s Open Access Initiative. The author, Oliver Roeder, shared data about the collection that he had transformed into information. What caught my eye was a visualization highlighting the vast number of objects acquired from Egypt compared to other countries. Inspired by my discovery and remembrance of the article, I made the Egyptian Art department the focus of my project.
Methods and Process
While moving around and testing the data in Tableau, I realized that much of it was difficult for the program to understand. For older works that were from bygone eras, oftentimes object origins were listed as ‘Probably Afghanistan,’ or ‘France?’ – not ideal for a program that needs clear terms. For many of the dimensions that I used I had to adjust the names so they could be more understandable to viewers. It was also difficult figuring out what certain data represented. For example, when viewing data for all departments 1963 had the most accessions of any year, but I was unable to find any information on why it was such a big spike for acquiring work.
I created a dashboard made of 6 different charts comparing multiple aspects of the Egyptian Art department’s data. My peer-reviewer, Kailen, provided great feedback on improving the readability and visuals of the charts. I believe this set of charts presents both historical and modern information of how The Met values its objects.
# of Accessions and Accession Year A straightforward graph that presents when objects were acquired, including objects that were not obtained through excavations.
# of Excavations and Accession Years This chart represents how many objects were obtained through an excavation, and what year said objects where acquired by The Met. Additionally, when interacting with the data on the dashboard, hovering over the bars can give the excavation title.
Excavation Sites A majority of the excavations have taken place in Cairo.
Is it in the Public Domain? “The public domain is the space where no intellectual property rights exist. This means that works in the public domain may be used without any restrictions whatsoever. Works enter into the public domain in different ways.”(“The Public Domain and 5 Things Not Covered by Copyright,” Creative Commons) I was surprised to see that even though many of the objects within the Egyptian Art department had no known artist, a majority of the artifacts are not open to the public domain.
Is is a Highlight? The Met considers a Highlight an object that is popular or historically significant. It’s interesting to see the vast number of objects within the Egyptian Art department in comparison to the small amount seen as Highlights.
Egyptian Art Department Versus Other Met Departments While the Egyptian Art department isn’t the largest department at The Met, it is still a significant part of the collection.
Reflection
After spending 6 hours working with Tableau, the program crashed and I lost 3/4ths of the progress I had made on the project. Heartbroken, I got back to work. After semesters of hearing my classmates praise its functions, I was eager to finally try out the program myself and was disappointed with the results. However, I had an easier time navigating and building interesting visualizations during my second attempt and I consider this project a success. For future projects working with Tableau, I plan to use data sources that contain more quantitative data over qualitative data.
References
Oliver Roeder, “An Excavation Of One Of The World’s Greatest Art Collections,” FiveThirtyEight (blog), April 6, 2017, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-excavation-of-one-of-the-worlds-greatest-art-collections/
“Latest Updates,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, accessed October 7, 2021, https://metmuseum.github.io/
“Making The Met – The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Google Arts & Culture, accessed October 7, 2021, https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/making-the-met/GQLS-pBlvVqAJQ
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access CSV (2016; repr., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021), https://github.com/metmuseum/openaccess
“The Public Domain and 5 Things Not Covered by Copyright,” Creative Commons (blog), January 16, 2017, https://creativecommons.org/2017/01/16/public-domain-5-things-not-covered-copyright/.