Assignment #1: Cultural Heritage By the Numbers F23

Guidelines for the Assignment:

The Cultural Heritage By the Numbers is an assignment in one step. It builds upon the work we did in class on September 12 and 14 using the Jupyter notebooks in posit.cloud.

This assignment can be done alone or in pairs. If it is done in pairs, please compose one markdown file which you place in both student sites.

This exercise focuses on the ways that the metadata obtainable from the Harvard Art Museum API can tell us something about historical and present world cultures. You can think of this assignment a way of taking a look at the way that museums collect different kinds of art from around the world, as well as how we can use an API to understand better how people “consume” the art of a museum.

Part 1: Explore the HAM website as well as the csv file of All Objects (found in the posit-cloud project). Choose a few pieces from the collections of interest to you. Was the website or the csv file easier to use? What are you able to say about the art pieces from their metadata?

Part 2: Use the notebook to determine for a given culture what are the most viewed items are in the HAM website? What about the least viewed? Describe the origin of these objects? Can you speculate on why the most and least viewed objects are what they are? Are these numbers suprising to you? Using the accession year data and the time series bar chart, what can you say about the acquisition of works coming from these three cultures? Do they tell you something about the relative popularity of art in a university museum in the United States? Can you compare it to other museums you have visited or know about?

Part 3: Using a choice of three cultures and the notebook, build word cloud based on the combined descriptions and titles of the objects from those cultures. Does this summary of the words tell us something about the way that cultures are important in a US art museum? Use the stop word function to remove certain words to “dig in” to the textual data a bit more? When you remove very high frequency words what do you discover? Compare your results across cultures.

Advanced optional extra steps:

-Can you adapt the code to look for the most common colors? The most common techniques? Or any other value from the attributes? What are you able to say about the cultures?

-Choose one culture and try to make a map of the “creation place” of the art? Does the geography of the creation of the art pieces match the culture in question, or not? Why?

Your assignment does not need to answer all the questions above, nor does it need to follow the steps one by one. It should be about 1500 words long, with relevant images saved from the notebooks, embedded links, etc. Use a markdown cheatsheet such as this one to stylize your post, adding different layout features and embedded links if needed. You can refer to the readings if you want to, but this is not necessary for this assignment.

Assignment 1 Due date: 28 September, 20% final grade.