Hacking the Humanities Midterm

For my midterm project, I created and published an illustrated timeline about Bronze sculptures in Tate's art collection made from 1950 to 1955 using TimelineJS. I chose to create a timeline because I am trying to get more experience with data visualization; I also though that doing it with sculptures could be a unique and interesting project. I specifically selected Bronze sculptures as those were among my grandparent's favorite work of art.

About this project

• Sources

I used the dataset tate_artwork_data-1950-55.csv from the shared Hacking the Humanities Google Drive class folder. The dataset contains data from artworks of Tate's art collection created from 1950 to 1995. For this specific project, I focused only on a subset of this dataset: sculptures made with Bronze within that time period.

• Processes

Using Excel, I cleaned the data so that the more than 700 lines of data ended up being 17 lines representing the bronze sculptures of interest. To achieve this, I followed the steps below:

• Filtered for medium equal to Bronze, and deleted every artwork with a different medium;
• Deleted every sculpture without a title or unknown data;
• Removed sculptures without pictures available;
• Deleted columns with data that was not of interest to this project, as author's id and entry's id.
• Sculptures of the same artist tend to have a lot in common. Therefore, I kept only the most recent Bronze sculpture of each artist. This was done as I was interested in seeing if there was any pattern in bronze sculptures between 1950 and 1955, so only one sample of each artist was a better choice - to not overrepresent a specific technique or style.



• Presentation

To help with the data visualization aspect I used TimelineJS, which is an open source tool in which one can create an interactive timeline visualization. To create the timeline, I pasted the information about the Bronze sculptures in the TimelineJS template and made sure to assign different background colors to different years, so it is easy to realize when years change and which sculptures were made in the same years.



Finally, I created this website using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap, so I could present the project and embeed the timeline generated.

• Significance

By creating a timeline with the Bronze sculptures, one can gain a further understanding of how Bronze sculptures change over time with regards to style, technique, and shape. For instance, one can easily recognize a pattern in Bronze sculptures from 1950 to 1955: sculptures resembling humans, specifically women's bodies or men's busts. Another insight of having a sculptures timeline is being able to associate sculptures with the feelings of that time. One example is Beuys's "Bed", symbolic of human suffering.