Huh! Was hoping to get, for example, a sense of scale of cultural artifacts stolen from Korea by the Japanese. But I don't see any provenance descriptions for Japanese institutions. Either way, this is super cool. Thank you for sharing this.
Fair catch, it only pulls from institutions with open access APIs (Met, V&A, SMB Berlin, AIC). Not aware of an equivalent from Japanese museums, if you know one, happy to add it.
In that case, the map looks misleading, doesn’t it? It looks as though London and Berlin, for example, stand out as having dislocated disproportionately many artifacts from around the world. And on the other hand, Paris looks innocent. But in truth, London and Berlin are just being honest about it giving you open access to the data whereas Paris doesn’t. So perhaps it would be better to mark cities that do provide data with, say, a green dot. This also helps the visual understanding of the direction of the transfer. And it would make it clear at a glance that Paris is not innocent, but that Paris is simply lacking data.
Fair point, and a good idea. A visual marker distinguishing "has open data" from "doesn't" would meaningfully reduce that distortion. Adding it to the list.
> London and Berlin are just being honest about it giving you open access to the data
A small subset of the data. If all London museums were included (such as the British Museum, for example) there would be a LOT more lines going to London.
Correct, scoped to western/euro-american museums as noted in the post, it’s just where I started. Open to expanding if there’s good open data to pull from.
One day I really should dig up my great great great great grandfather’s[^1] diaries to see first hand how he justified bringing back so much stuff to the UK.
Looks like you've got some real history there. Think about it. You might even be able to hack together an Ask My Ancestor chatbot. Heck, I’d build it for you. The scamming and the OCR are going to be the hardest parts I imagine.
From a UX perspective, it is very weird to place the toggle button for the right panel at the top of the left panel... After I gave up to find a way to close the right panel, I found that button a few minutes later, when I looked around for other interactive elements.
I couldn't figure out from the UI but is there a way to filter the map? Say, I only want to see things going out of Cusco or I only want to see where things end up in Berlin?
It would also be nice to have some directionality to the lines to indicate source and destination, perhaps a colour or lightness gradient or something.
Thanks! You actually can filter by source already, search lets you filter arcs by place/site. Destination filtering technically works too, via Collections, but that only makes sense while there are a handful, once it’s hundreds it’ll need its own proper destination filter. Good call on the color/gradient distinction for source vs. destination on the arcs too, that’s worth trying.
One thing I'd find interesting is the inverse view: instead of starting from a place or artifact, start from a museum and visualize the geographic footprint of its collection. It could make the collection's provenance surprisingly tangible, especially for institutions with very global holdings.
A small subset of the data. If all London museums were included (such as the British Museum, for example) there would be a LOT more lines going to London.
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Richard_Hamilton
From a UX perspective, it is very weird to place the toggle button for the right panel at the top of the left panel... After I gave up to find a way to close the right panel, I found that button a few minutes later, when I looked around for other interactive elements.
I couldn't figure out from the UI but is there a way to filter the map? Say, I only want to see things going out of Cusco or I only want to see where things end up in Berlin?
It would also be nice to have some directionality to the lines to indicate source and destination, perhaps a colour or lightness gradient or something.