Out of all the readings assigned for this week, the one I was most impressed by was Helen D. Wall’s “120kMoMA – A data visualization study of the MoMA collection dataset.” This article reminded me of our own digital projects we completed in DH 101 last quarter. The author did a great job not only presenting and explaining her visualizations, but also explaining her methodology and the questions and issues she faced along the way.
Wall said she got her data from MoMA’s open collection data available on GitHub. (This is an example of how the public uses open cultural data online posted by the museums).
Right off, Wall stated the purpose and importance of her independent digital project saying that by analyzing the dataset from a new perspective, examining features in a different way, by creating new categories and groupings, we can gain new insights about not only the artworks and the artists, but also about the institution which houses these artworks.
I think here it’s important to mention the concept of an “ontology,” which is basically how you interpret and categorize data. So, given the same data, different people can have different ontologies for that information, and thus, emphasize different properties and relationships of that dataset. Here, with the MoMA collection and Helen Wall’s project, it’s clear that the way Wall chose to organize the artists and the artworks is different from how MoMA had it.
After presenting several visualizations on artistbio, department, classification, creditline, and dimensions, Wall discussed the problem with categorizing these artworks. For instance, she brings the example of Frank Stella’s Kastura (1979) and Giufà, la luna, i ladri e le guardie (1984), both of which include oil paint and aluminum, yet the first one is classified by MoMA as a painting, and the second work is classified as a sculpture. Thus, Wall’s argument is that now especially with the increasing contributions of modern art styles, perhaps it’s no longer accurate to use the medium of an artwork as anchor for classifying a work as any particular type of art.