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.
3 thoughts on “Reflection: Network of Artists”
Comments are closed.
This DH project is super interesting! The connections between each artist are also unclear to me; however, the extensive metadata surrounding each individual makes clicking through the graph entertaining. Interestingly, some artists were not interested in the traditional mediums of artwork you would find in a museum, such as Claude Debussy. He was a musician with internet in Piano and Ballets Russes. I feel that visual media would primarily focus on museums; however, I love the variety they include in this database! Your analysis of this organization’s project was concise and informative, and it gave me a great foundation to further look into the project myself.
I like how you explained this network very thoroughly; when I first looked at it, it seemed a bit overwhelming. Nevertheless, this network seems really useful for preserving historical art and I like that you pointed out that users can learn about different artists who’re similar to ones they already like. One thing that stands out to me is that this network allows for users to easily find different attributes about artists, like you mentioned, since it seems that a problem with some other networks is that the scope of information they provide is fairly narrow.
Wow! This DH project is so interesting! It seems like the project focuses on abstraction in the early 20th century. This project reminds me of the movie Midnight in Paris. Even though I had not watched it, my girlfriend always talked to me about it. It’s about a man time traveled to Paris in 1890, where he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas. Knowing the artist’s social connections is fun because we can learn how they influenced each others’ styles of art.