Midterm – Birth and Death Places of Non-UK Artists born between 1900-1919

1. Introduction

For this project, I created a globe map displaying the distance between the birth and death places of non-UK artists born between 1900-1919, by using the tate_artists-NonUK-b1900-1919 dataset. My aim for this project is to visualize the distance between their birthplace and their death place. There will be 2 visualization: the first (the visualization above) is everyone in the dataset that has both place of birth and death, the second (the visualization below) is each individual artist that has both place of birth and death. The method I used is to find the latitude and longitude of those places and map them in a globe, which Flourish has. And the results are great!

2. Sources

I used the tate_artists-NonUK-b1900-1919 dataset. The dataset includes the artists’ ID, name, gender, dates (birth-current), year of birth, year of death, place of birth, place of death, and the Tate url of the artists. For my purposes, I only needed the artists’ name, place of birth, and place of death.

3. Processes

1. I copied the tate_artists-NonUK-b1900-1919 dataset into my spreadsheet (there are tabs in my spreadsheet so you can follow what I’m going to say in the following).
2. I first made a new tab for Names and Places.
3. I then made it simpler to just Places of Birth&Death. This is so that I can get the latitude and longitude much easier. And to find the latitude and longitude without having to manually input them one by one to Google Maps, I asked DeepSeek for it. This is because ChatGPT wasn’t able to give me the exact location points. Here is what I asked on DeepSeek: (the results you can see on the DeepSeek data tab on the sheet).
4. I verified that DeepSeek gave me an accurate location by randomly selecting a couple different location’s lat and long and inserting them to Google Maps. The location from DeepSeek came to be very accurate.
5. I then asked Deepseek again for just the locations. (you can find this data in the Locations tab).
6. After I inputed all of DeepSeek’s data into my sheets, I created 2 Flourish map visualization with:Names and Places and Locations.

4. Presentation

Here is the second visualization of the map. Here, you can pick the artists and see where was their birthplace (the location before the arrow) and their place of death (the location after the arrow). The reason why I have 2 visualizations of the map is because I wasn’t able to make everything into one. If Flourish allowed me to have an “all artists” selection, I would’ve just made 1 visualization. I want my design choice to be as simple and minimalistic as possible to give the user a straightforward experience so they would easily understand what’s going on.

5. Significance

I think a great insight is the ability to instantly visualize the mapping and distance of locations really nicely. I think that it relates to Digital Arts & Humanities, as opposed to data science generally, as it can raise humanities questions from looking at it. One possible question could be: Is Tate biased towards Western artists, instead of Eastern artists, because the globe mainly shows artists born and die in America or Europe? And so on.

I also think that this project benefits greatly from using AI in the realm of digital humanities. Having to easily find the latitude and longitude from a wide array of locations really fast serves a benefit for saving time. But at the same time, AI just gives an estimate for where do the artists die, not the exact detail of where they died or where they are buried.