Reflection: Network of Artists

Katrina
Sat, 01 Oct 2022 02:39:14 +0000
Week 3, Network analysis, Reflective Blog Post

MoMA | Inventing Abstraction | Connections

What (or who) are the nodes and what are the edges?
The nodes are the artists (whose works were exhibited at MOMA, the museum of modern art) and the edges represent connections between artists. Artists that have over 24 connections within the network are highlighted with a different color than those who don’t.

How are the relationships characterized and categorized?
I was not very sure about what counts as a connection between artists, but the connected artists seem to have shared places of birth or work. Also, based on the default display of the network, it seems like artists were vaguely split into different groupings, but the criteria behind were unclear.

What interactions does the project allow?
This project allows users to click into specific nodes – in order to explore some details of that artist, such as year of birth, death, snapshots of work, and interests.
When a user clicks the artist, they will see the subnetwork with that artist at the center.

How does this impact their effectiveness and/or your engagement?
At first glance, I was attracted by the animation and aesthetics of the network. I think it allows users, especially ones that know just a few artists in that network, to explore more artists related to those that were known by them.

How was the project created?
I think that this project is created based on the large dataset (that contains photos, descriptions, and biographies) of various artists and the descriptions of their work. This project offers a great opportunity for users who were not able to physically visit the museum to get to know some artists and their pieces of work.

In addition, one thing I realized with those projects is that a huge proportion of them describes the relationship of people. I look forward to seeing more projects that use a different source of input as nodes.