My Midterm

Introduction

This project examines the birth countries of artists in the Tate Gallery collection who were born between 1900 and 1920. Using publicly available Tate metadata, the project asks where these artists were geographically born and how those birthplaces are distributed across countries. The data are presented as a frequency-based horizontal bar chart, allowing for clear comparison across countries and highlighting patterns of national representation within the collection during the early twentieth century.

Sources

The dataset used in this project comes from the Tate Gallery’s open-access artist metadata, specifically a subset of artists born between 1900 and 1920. The original dataset included fields such as artist name, birth year, death year, place of birth, and associated URLs. Data cleaning was performed in OpenRefine to extract and standardize birth-country information from the place-of-birth field. Rows with missing birth-country data were removed to avoid introducing an unlabeled category in the visualization. Some country names appear in their original language, reflecting multilingual metadata conventions in the source data.

Processes

For data cleaning and preparation, I used OpenRefine. I did some faceting and clustering of country values, identified missing entries, and removed rows with blank birth-country information. This wasn’t too bad. After cleaning, the dataset was exported as a CSV file and uploaded to Flourish. This part was more difficult to get it to look how I wanted. A horizontal bar chart was selected with aggregation set to count to visualize the frequency of artists by birth country. Sorting by value ensures that the most represented countries appear first, improving readability and interpretability.

Presentation

The project is a single-page website hosted on a dedicated subdomain. The Flourish visualization is embedded directly on the page to enable interactivity, including hover-based inspection of values. A horizontal bar chart format was chosen to accommodate long country names and to make relative differences in counts visually clear. 

Significance

This visualization reveals a strong concentration of artists born in the United Kingdom, followed by significantly smaller representations from other countries, reflecting both the national focus of the Tate collection and broader historical patterns in art institutionalization during the early twentieth century. From a Digital Arts and Humanities perspective, the project demonstrates how data cleaning and visualization tools can be used to critically engage with cultural metadata, revealing patterns that may not be apparent through individual records alone. At the same time, the project highlights limitations in archival data, such as incomplete or inconsistently labeled geographic information, underscoring the importance of transparency in data preparation and interpretation.