- Sources
I started by downloading two datasets from the class’s shared folder. The first dataset contains information about artists who were born between 1920 – 1939 and whose artworks are part of Tate’s collections (‘tate_artist_data-1920-1939.csv’). The other dataset contains information about Tate’s artwork collections that were made between 1950 – 1955 (‘tate_artwork_data-1950-55.csv’).
2. Processes
I started by cleaning datasets using OpenRefine, an open-source software for working with messy data. For the artist dataset, I separated the ‘placeOfBirth’ column into two new columns, ‘Birth_City’ and “Birth_Country”, and ‘placeOfDeath’ into ‘Death_City’ and ‘Death_Country’ in order to make the later mapping process easier. Then, I loaded the datasets in R to join them and created a new dataset called ‘total_artist_artwork.csv’
3. Presentation
I used ArcGIS, a software for mapping geographical data, to map places of birth and death of the artists in the dataset.
Each dot in the map represents an artist who was born between 1920 – 1939. Orange dots represent female artists, blue dots represent male artists, and gray dots represent artists with no gender information available.
By clicking a dot, you will see a pop-up window that contains a list of information about the artist. The example below shows information about a Japanese artist, Shinzo Shimamoto. The pop-up window shows the artist’s name, gender, year of birth/death, place of birth/death, and the name of one of the artworks made between 1950-1955 (if any). If interested, you can click “More info” button to learn more about the artist and his artwork on the Tate’s website.
4. Significance
Although we are only looking at a very small subset of the Tate Collection, the map clearly shows the lack of female representation in the art word in the early 1950s. Another takeaway from the map is that most of the Tate’s collections that were made between 1950-1955 were made by artists who were born/died in Europe and the United States.
