Our group’s dataset involves a vast collection of artwork from Williams College Museum of Arts. Our research questions wanted to analyze this artwork using features like time period, qualities of the artwork such as color and medium, or culture of origin. These research questions make OpenRefine helpful since our questions require for the data to be categorized.
However, the data that displayed after opening our file in OpenRefine didn’t quite match the tutorial given. I think one of the things we may need to do with the data is to modify it to have a more controlled vocabulary, since most of the pieces have elaborate, specific descriptions. We still need to further divide our categories into sub-categories. Another point that my group members discussed was that since our dataset involves artwork, we want to incorporate Williams College Museum of Arts’s large archive of photographs into our research as an aesthetic component. A program like what was used for Robots Reading Vogue would help us in this regard.