Sources

To create this project, I used a dataset from the Tate gallery in England. This dataset includes all of the Tate gallery artists born between 1900 and 1929, along with the date and location of their birth and death, their gender, and a link to their profile on the Tate gallery website. This profile includes more biographical information and photos of their famous works.

Download the original csv file here:

Processes

To clean this dataset for my own project, I used the application OpenRefine. This software allowed me to ensure all the data was clustered, especially when it came to the artist’s birthplace. Luckily, this dataset was created without much clustering work needing to be done. I also made sure to transform all of the birthplaces to titlecase and remove any leading or trailing white space. After this was done to the entire CSV, I began by clustering on the basis of gender, starting with the female artists.

Once I had a CSV of the female artists, I manually removed the artists who did not have a birthplace named. Then, I used the Google Chrome extension SmartMonkey to geocode the birthplaces into longitude and latitude format. Once I was able to generate the coordinates, I split the singe coordinate column by the comma, so that the longitude and latitude would be in separate columns. I repeated this process with the male artists.

After I had these coordinates formatted correctly, I was able to upload the male and female tables as discrete map layers on ArcGIS, along with a combined table. The coordinates from each layer were then able to be plotted and converted into a heat map.

Presentation

Once the heat map was generated, I published it as an interactive map, so that viewers can toggle between studying just the female artists’ birthplaces or just the male artists’ birthplaces, or choose to view the combined layer. Additionally, to give viewers a different perspective, they can also view multiple layers at once to see how they overlap, as well as click specific locations to see which artists were born there.

From there, I embedded the map to this site, giving the overall project more context and capturing screenshots of specific layers. I embedded the interactive map, so site visitors can experience the map without having to leave the initial site. I also decided to include a small gallery of some of the artists’ works on the home page of the site because this gives the project more visual appeal, especially since it deals with artwork.

Significance

When studying this data through a geocoding lens, there are trends that clearly jump out to viewers, which maybe would not have been as evident as before. For both the male and female artists, we can see how Eurocentric the assortment of included artists is. During this time period, the heat map highlights that among male and female artists, most of the Tate’s collection stems from artists born in England and Western Europe. Additionally, we can see how the second most common birthplace is in the Eastern United States.

Separating the artists by gender also reveals how the overall trends are reflected in each gender’s heat map, despite the much more limited number of female artists there are. Additionally, allowing users to click on areas of the map to learn more about the specific artists highlights the inequality among the number of male and female artists included. The most popular birthplace among both groups is London, England, but only 26 female artists were born here, while 96 male artists were born here. This difference shows how few female artists from this time period are in the collection.

Viewing the data in this manner helps to highlight the curatory work that is still left to be done. If the Tate gallery wants to fill in gaps in their collection among artists born between 1900 and 1929, I urge them to look into female artists born in places besides the Eastern United States and Western Europe.