I run Good, Form & Spectacle, a small digital agency specialising in cultural heritage projects, and a product startup called Museum in a Box, a new play on the old idea of a museum handling collection that uses 3D printing and Internet of Things to make learning with museum objects a tactile, interactive, and fun experience.
In my continuing quest for a bird’s eye view on the arts & culture landscape, today I poked at the current data on the Arts Council’s National Portfolio Organisations (NPO). On the Arts Council website, there’s an Excel download of all the NPO organisations for 2018-2022. So, I downloaded that, and made a Google spreadsheet version: Copy of all NPOs and funding 2018-2022.
I found this useful to help with grounding amongst all the big numbers flying around. It helped me realise that the £1.57M relief promised to the sector is a big amount, since that’s just below the total funding across all NPOs for 2018-2022, which amounts to £1,622,621,636. The difficult part is that there are 840 organisations listed here, and — even though I’m not sure anyone actually knows — there are lots more than 840 arts orgs across the UK.
The disciplines listed are:
Combined arts
Dance
Literature
Museums
Music
Theatre
Visual arts, and
Not specific
When I sorted the sheet by Column 0 (% change in support from one period to the other) + Column D (Funding band) + Column N (Total Funding 2018-2022), you quickly see:
187 orgs have been added for four-year period, adding £147,487,464 to the funding pot
526 orgs have retained the same level of funding across both periods, 0% change
You can see little blobs of new NPOs at round funding figures; like seeds
Some other facts I didn’t know before poking at this data:
Royal Opera House is funded to the tune of £24,028,840 annually (and that’s about 20% of its income normally)
There are 36 “Band 3” orgs, which receive a minimum of £1,000,000 per year, and have other requirements around diversity, international collaboration, education, digital etc, per Page 41 of the NPO Relationship Framework.
There are 58 Sector Support Organisations (SSOs), including 24 new ones in this period. SSOs are great.
I found this table not very helpful in the ACE-produced NPO info, perhaps because it doesn’t connect with the overall list of NPOs or show crossover, for example a BME+LGBT+Female-led? Or, am I missing something blindingly obvious here?
The questions from my friend, and long time advisor and conversator from afar, Eliza Gregory, has been chatting and emailing with me about all this… and she’s sent me questions that I like so much, I’m just going to copy them in here.
What are the social implications of entrenching cultural wealth in terms of endowments, grants and artifacts?
What social problems are connected to these practices?
And on the other side, what might society be like if we changed the way a portion of that wealth is held or distributed?
In what ways do these practices uphold the colonial project/the colonial/Victorian legacy that actually holds the entire society back?
In what ways do these practices continue to explicitly support white supremacy?
And what would it mean for all people to be liberated from that structure?
Can we picture ourselves freed from it?
What does that look like?
What does that feel like? (So, so good.)
Again, rough stuff, comments welcome, suggestions for direction or collaborators who are doing similar things even more welcome!
I’ve spent today looking up the 2019 Annual Reports of all the Arm’s Length Organisations that DCMS gives grant-in-aid funding to. I’ve put some figures I think are involved in my learning about Who Needs It Less?
These are big numbers. I’ve collated a few different fields per organisation I think are interesting:
Total income (for that year)
Total expenditure
Net income (which may be in the red)
Fixed assets (which likely include tangible, intangible, heritage, and certain types of investments)
Current assets (like stocks, debtors or cash)
Grant-in-aid figure if I could find it in the Annual Report (and there’s a second sheet in the spreadsheet that gets that number per org from a doc I found from Parliament, which is linked as the source)
Endowment if that figure is noted separately
From this basic by-hand aggregation, you can see stuff like the BBC’s Total Income in 2018 was £4,889,000,000 or National Gallery had the highest Net Income at £15,400,000.
Then I added two % calculations:
Current Assets as a percentage of the Total Income for that year, and
Grant-in-aid as a percentage of the Total Income for that year
Now, I’m not stating anything resembling an approach to trying to figure out which orgs to support and how, but, I’m wondering about these two percentage figures… could they be some measure of health or stability? As Frankie rightly commented on my previous post about this, the Fixed Assets held by our great institutions are probably basically irrelevant, since they’re practically priceless. But maybe if you can say something like the Imperial War Museum has Current Assets that could cover about 64% of its annual income, does that get us anywhere? Or that Royal Armouries has 12% coverage from its Current Assets?
What if we look for orgs that have current (or, more fluid) assets that cover less than 20% of their annual income for 2018 and help them first? Or 50%? Better yet, we could filter that list to deliberately favour BAME and LGBT and disabled-led orgs.
What if the government (and our society) is able to seize this moment to actively work againstthe preferential structures in its own system? It could actively generate assets for littlies. Grant them 1-3 years equivalent to their 2018 income, and give them an endowment equal to the average of the Arm’s Length orgs, which by my rough calculations is 47% of 2018 income in the bank. That would be a reflection of the healthy situation DCMS has built with their Arm’s Length program, would it not?
I thought I’d have a look at NPOs next, poking at that Current Assets idea. It can be enlightening to see who has no wealth, when that’s such a marker of systemic exclusion.
Notes on data creation:
I’ve left comments on cells if something odd or there’s extra info or detail
Sources are individual org’s annual reports, linked in Column B
If there’s an overarching group, I’ve used that number
Director’s Pay is the total package, salary + pension etc
DCMS grant in aid is as noted in the annual report
I’ve basically looked for what appears to be the same numbers across all the annual report documents – that’s mostly the Balance Sheet and Financial Statements
If I’ve left a cell (or row, in the case of the BBC) blank, that means it’s too hard for me to find or process or put into this structure
This post is a branching off from my (George) personal blog, where I have been writing throughout lockdown about various things. I am interested to try to teach myself more about the Arts & Culture funding landscape in the UK, especially as the government has just announced their £1.57M grant, and because I’ve been trying harder to see where systemic racism and sexism live. I want to know how the funding will be distributed. I’m curious to see if I can draw the overall arts and culture funding picture a bit more clearly for myself, and thought others might be interested.
I would love for this to a be a conversation, especially if I’m really missing very important aspects as I explore. Comments are welcome.
Assets vs Need?
Today I haven’t been able to stop thinking of something that struck me when I first moved to the UK in 2014. One day, fairly soon after I’d moved here, I happened to have a coffee with Ed Vaizey, with my friend Wolfgang. He was very pleasant. I was not at all prepared as well as I should have been, and nothing came of it, which is one of my few regrets. But, the thing I noticed and remember most was that Mr. Vaizey’s shirt collar was frayed. How strange, I thought, that the Minster for Digital and Creative Industries couldn’t afford a shirt that wasn’t frayed. I mean, he has his own coat of arms.
Ed Vaizey’s coat of arms
I remember mentioning this to a new English friend who informed me that this was an ever so subtle class marker. That upper class people like to wear things out instead of buying new replacements. Very, very wealthy people apparently don’t have much actual cash, since all their wealth is tied up in things that are difficult to extract their wealth from, like a big house, or, say, most of the real estate in Bloomsbury, as is the case with the British Museum, whose total net assets were listed as £1,001,693,000 in its 2018/19 Annual Report on the Consolidated Balance Sheet, as at 31 March 2019. How hard it must be to see all that money listed as a line item in a balance sheet and not be able to use it.
I’ve been thinking about that £1,570,000,000 cash injection offered by the government to the arts sector, and trying to think about Who Needs This Funding The Least? It’s early days for my data gathering and poking, and sadly, the decisions have likely already been made about who is going to benefit, although I understand there will be some form of application for some. I’ve found it easy to let the various giant numbers flying around wash over me… 1 billion here, 120 million there so step one is to try to see some of these numbers, and particularly to see them against other comparators, to get a sense of the scale of the situation.
Today I learned that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) gives funds each year to what’s called “Arm’s Length Bodies” which receive what’s called “Grant in Aid”. I found a DCMS Estimate Memorandum containing a certain Table 3: Comparing the Grant in Aid funding of our Arm’s length bodies in 2016-17 through to 2018-19, which I share with you below:
Organisation
2017 projected
2017 actual
2018 projected
British Broadcasting Corporation
£3,156,700,000
£3,185,400,000
£3,255,500,000
Arts Council England
£460,526,000
£494,183,000
£479,972,000
Ofcom1
£72,295,000
£123,039,000
£106,300,000
Sport England
£105,649,000
£101,787,000
£104,795,000
British Library
£93,911,000
£93,893,000
£93,443,000
Historic England
£87,806,000
£87,912,000
£90,734,000
UK Sport
£53,536,000
£60,890,000
£61,431,000
VisitBritain
£56,972,000
£60,458,000
£56,818,000
British Museum
£53,569,000
£53,473,000
£42,046,000
Natural History Museum
£49,115,000
£41,815,000
£41,815,000
Science Museum Group
£43,343,000
£46,903,000
£40,428,000
Tate Gallery
£40,251,000
£38,066,000
£37,566,000
Victoria & Albert Museum
£40,257,000
£37,726,000
£37,176,000
National Gallery
£24,092,000
£24,092,000
£24,092,000
Imperial War Museum
£32,136,000
£25,347,000
£23,634,000
British Film Institute
£23,965,000
£23,587,000
£20,878,000
National Museums Liverpool
£20,050,000
£19,761,000
£19,761,000
Royal Museums Greenwich
£16,019,000
£16,019,000
£15,869,000
S4C3
£6,762,000
£6,956,000
£15,097,000
Royal Armouries
£7,088,000
£7,788,000
£8,938,000
UKAD
£6,096,000
£6,046,000
£7,998,000
National Portrait Gallery
£6,637,000
£9,734,000
£6,634,000
National Heritage Memorial Fund
£35,250,000
£5,489,000
£5,000,000
Horniman Museum and Gardens
£4,549,000
£4,320,000
£3,820,000
Information Commissioners Office
£3,790,000
£5,740,000
£3,750,000
The Wallace Collection
£2,711,000
£3,711,000
£2,711,000
Churches Conservation Trust
£2,749,000
£2,738,000
£2,604,000
Geffrye Museum
£1,696,000
£1,786,000
£1,796,000
Sports Grounds Safety Authority 2
£0
£1,542,000
£1,601,000
Sir John Soane’s
£1,983,000
£1,012,000
£1,012,000
Table 3: Comparing the Grant in Aid funding of our Arm’s length bodies in 2016-17 through to 2018-19
Isn’t that interesting? That is a bunch of support. What robust affirmative action! A total of £4,613,219,000 projected to be granted to these 30 “arm’s length” organisations in 2018. There’s the British Museum up there in the list, which was projected to receive £42,046,000 in 2018. The BM’s annual report (linked above) confirms for us that indeed: “The British Museum received £39.4 million revenue and £13.1 million capital grant-in-aid from the DCMS in 2018/19” on page 16.
All 30 organisations who receive this Grant in Aid are required to sign a Management Agreement with DCMS, and report back in a standard way so DCMS can see how well the grants are being used and measure performance consistently. For example, here is the Total income of DCMS-funded cultural organisations 2018/19 report from DCMS.
Big numbers can be numbing
The government’s support package announced this week to be spread across lots more organisations is about 34.03% of that total annual “arms length” grant in aid dispensed in 2018. I hope my maths is correct, otherwise I’m going to look even more naive and foolish. I am very willing to be called out on this if I have made mistakes, so I can learn more. I have tried to not make mistakes. I found Will Gompertz’s analysis of the situation useful, and he notes the basic breakdown of the COVID arts and culture grant we know today:
The £1.15bn support pot for cultural organisations in England is made up of £880m in grants and £270m of repayable loans. The government said the loans would be “issued on generous terms”.
Funding will also go to the devolved administrations – £33m to Northern Ireland, £97m to Scotland and £59m to Wales.
A further £100m will be earmarked for national cultural institutions in England and the English Heritage Trust.
There will also be £120m to restart construction on cultural infrastructure and for heritage construction projects in England that were paused due to the pandemic.
The government said decisions on who will get the funding would be made “alongside expert independent figures from the sector”.
I am definitely glad to see that the cultural sector has been recognised as having value and need for support. This is unequivocally good. The very early point I am trying to make is that there might be a way to look past and around and through the giant nationals with the loudest voices and ongoing DCMS support in the millions and with vast assets (many of whom as speaking to us via that 5 July government press release to say how happy they are) to see if it’s possible, finally, to illuminate the smaller players, the dynamic and struggling groups, the covens of freelance talent, the support companies, and basically everyone else who isn’t one of the biggies.
Staring into the status quo
I chatted about this with a few arts-related friends, and Clare directed me to a report called The Art of Dying written in 2005 by John Knell. I hope everyone who’s dispensing funds has studied it and can recite it from start to finish. It’s a response to a conference held the year before, where these three main insights were born, and I quote:
1. That the portfolio of arts organisations in the UK has become too fixed
2. That there are too many undercapitalised arts organisations, operating at near breaking point organisationally and financially, whose main preoccupation is survival diverting their energies from the central mission of cultural creativity
3. That we need to provoke a more challenging public conversation about the infrastructure supporting the arts in the UK, and the strategy and modus operandi of arts organisation
I really like what Mr. Knell is writing in this paper – it’s definitely worth your time to read it. It’s important to be able to look at each other and agree that an organisation with £1,001,693,000 worth of assets is stable. Or bloody well should be.
So interesting.
Chatting further with more arts and culture colleagues, I was encouraged — thanks, Fiona — to reframe the question to: Who Needs It The Most? This is a much harder question. I’d consider myself to be a true friend to all museums everywhere, but I have to admit I particularly love the small ones that are super fucked, and definitely don’t have £1,001,693,000 hiding away in real estate or other investments that are difficult to access because there’s some form of governance in the way of deciding to release them.
As I look at the big, open, reported numbers, I will also be on the hunt for the numbers hiding in plain sight, or not documented at all. And please, if you can direct me to good reporting on arts and culture networks and their funding, I would absolutely love the steer.
In case you hadn’t seen, the major piece of work done at G,F&S in 2019 was the fabulous and interesting two-week data residency at M+ Museum in Hong Kong. We LOVED it.
I’ve written it up extensively (as part of the engagement) on Medium:
Now, I’d like to note for the record that, after a year or two of deeper concentration on my other endeavour, Museum in a Box (and it’s going really well!), this year I’m keen to rekindle work I do through Good, Form & Spectacle.
Specifically, I’m on the hunt for interesting, creative and/or design residencies and short, sharp, smart work with great museum/library/archive teams with gnarly collections and interesting questions.
So… If you’ve ever considered deploying Good, Form & Spectacle at your organisation, just like Wellcome, MoMA, or the Wikimedia Foundation, now is a great time to get in touch!
Last year, I was engaged by the Wikimedia Foundation to do a usability and community deep dive into their Wikimedia Commons platform, thinking about how it might be improved or adapted with a critical eye on:
what the system is like for new folks,
how new institutional partners could be attracted,
I ended up becoming really interested three main things:
Differences in the administrative feel of different language communities,
The diversity challenges faced by the platform, and especially comparing the way the “elders” of the community governed with how the community at Flickr managed to get along without too many car crashes. Very interesting to compare those two different, huge communities to see how different they are, and
Organic vs top-down information systems and how that plays out in the intense Commons “category” system, a topic that’s dear to my heart.
George Oates is a web designer, producer and developer who has been working with digital collections since 2003. She was one the founding team of Flickr, and the originator of Flickr Commons. She currently heads heritage design studio Good, Form & Spectacle, working with institutions including the British Museum, the Wellcome Library and the V&A. In this interview with Mitchell Whitelaw, Oates discusses her developing practice in making and remaking digital collections, spanning web-scale services, unsolicited interfaces, messy metadata and gentle interventions in institutional practice.
Oates, G. & Whitelaw, M., (2018). George Oates: Making and Remaking Collections Online. Open Library of Humanities. 4(1), p.32. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.325
After a fun three-ish years in fancy Bloomsbury, we’re off further east, to Hoxton. It’s been lovely being in the middle of everything, and down the street from the British Museum (and that excellent currywurst place), but our landlord, in all their wisdom, is ending our lease because they want to refurbish. We keep wondering whether they’ll uncover any of Hans Sloane’s collection buried in the garden!
We’ll be at:
Unit 9, The Energy Centre
Bowling Green Walk
London, N1 6AL
During our Bloomsbury tenure, I took a bunch of panoramas of the office in whatever state it was in, for the record.
We’re happy to announce our latest project, for the newly-opened Postal Museum in Clerkenwell! The new museum opened late July, and included a new Discovery Room, a brilliant public space where you can access archival objects directly, upon request. We were tasked with making the first instalment of an interactive table to help people browse around the collections, and hopefully be prompted to ask an archivist a question, or delve a little deeper.
Discovery Room
Part of the new building is this new public space you can visit, and ask to see original materials (as well as browse the digital collection and use our swanky new touch table). You need to allow a bit of time for things to be retrieved from the stores, but, why not give it a try? It’s upstairs on the first floor, and free!
Two Collections to Start
The Postal Museum has a huge trove of all sorts of visual materials, from the obvious philately collections, to letters, to maps, to posters, to photography. For this first stage, they wanted us to show the core collection of the museum, the R. M. Phillips Collection (which tracks the history of the UK postage stamp in unparalleled and thorough detail), and a selection of Post Office: Photograph Library, mostly around post and war, but with some vehicles and interiors too. We’ve tried to keep in mind that it would be nice to incorporate more collections over time too, once the new building has settled in a bit.
We used a metadata export from the museum’s CALM database, served up images using IIIF, served with Cantaloupe, through a Ruby app.
I’ve done a bad job of getting nice images of the actual UI, so will endeavour to update this post with some once I have my act together!
Seeing Things Big
We knew we wanted to take full advantage of the affordances of a lovely big screen and simple touch gestures. Rather than crowding the interface with lots of niggly controls, we wanted the brilliant imagery to take centre stage. Even as we were getting to know the R. M. Phillips Collection, we just kept zooming in all the time to see the lovely details, so wanted to help others do that too.
This is where we ended up, the view when you’re looking at a single thing, really zoomed in:
Collaborators
This was our first collaboration with Buckley Williams, and we sincerely hope it wasn’t the last! Thank you, Nat & Dan.
A favourite part of the collaboration (apart from the consistently snappy outfits and extreme talent) was our placeholder image, which we used on the table so we could proceed with the UI as we loaded all the whopper images… it’s one of those ones that you know won’t slip through.
DateRanger
As you may be aware, we try to always look for small utilities we think other people might be able to use, like the marcxml-to-postgres slurper, or the dimension-drawer, and we’ve found another one, called DateRanger. Nat has posted separately about this, so if you’re interested in why the heck dates are so hard in cultural collections, maybe head over there for a look.
As humans we find it easy to quickly read a variety of date formats and almost instantly understand what they represent. We can glance at dates written as “23rd Jan 1894”, “Jan-Mar 1856”, “c. 1960” or “1945-1949” and we know how big the date range is and how accurate it might be. These are just a few examples of dates formats we found in the Postal Museum collections.
To work with those dates effectively in our software we needed to find a way to parse them and represent them in a single format. There are many software libraries designed for translating between standardised date formats (eg. ones used by different countries), but parsing formats commonly used in archives is a slightly less popular problem to solve. Archives tend not to have an enforced, fixed way of writing down dates, so there can be a surprising variety of notations. This isn’t a bad thing — it gives the archivists the flexibility they need to represent their knowledge about the objects under their care. Each collection might have its own quirks.
I wrote DateRanger, a Ruby library which takes in those formats and translates them into a data structure which represents the start and end of the date range. It makes it straightforward to understand the accuracy of the date — the wider the range, the less accurate or specific the date was to begin with. We’d love to see contributions from anyone interested in expanding how many formats DateRanger can work with.
I used automated tests to build up the code in stages, starting from parsing really simple dates, and culminating at testing even obscure format combinations that we didn’t quite encounter in our data sample. The tests-first approach meant I managed to notice and catch some pretty confusing bugs really early on.
We used DateRanger on the Postal Museum touch table, to help us determine where on the timeline to place the collection records. We did, however, use the original date formats from the archive to display to the viewer. After all, those are already perfectly human-readable.
On September 7, 2016, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York cracked open a new repository on the code repository service, Github. In addition to the release of their popular collection dataset, the museum also made the unprecedented decision to share the exhibition history of the museum (from 1929 to 1989), which also included a ton of archival material like press releases, installation photographs, and catalogues. You can see the official version on moma.org.
MoMA asked Good, Form & Spectacle to make a spelunker to showcase this data, and we were thrilled to oblige.
As with all our previous spelunkers, the first step we usually take is to map out a basic plan for the information and how you’ll move around in it. This is often a basic List -> Item pattern, where List can be made up from any of the main data elements. In the case of MoMA, that was Exhibitions, Roles, People/Orgs, and Departments. From each list view, you can move to a single instance of that type of thing, and from that single instance, back out into others, like from an exhibition to the year it happened, or to an artist in that exhibition. (We also get a Python project running on Heroku, and pop our own first commits on Github.)
The main reason we enjoyed making the MoMA Exhibition Spelunker so much was because the data was of a different nature to a collection dataset. As well as listing each exhibition over that period, the data also shows all the people who were involved, both the artists, but also, interestingly, museum staff and other collaborators. We’ve looked a little at how metadata can represent institutional dynamics with Week 1 of the What’s in the Library? project with Wellcome Library, but this was altogether more fine-grained. Who are the actors in this institution? Can you see their influence?
First Impressions
So, once we have the basic List -> Item scaffold in place, it’s really a matter of trying to answer the questions that come up for us as we poke around all the corners of the data. One of the first simple visuals we added as the basic timeline, to show quickly and clearly what happened, and when.
Straight away, even a simple graphic like this asks questions. What’s that peak in World War II? Why the dip in the 50s? Why was 1978 such a full year?
It’s important to say at this point that a lot of what I’ll write next about what I discovered in the MoMA Spelunker is pure conjecture and presumption, based on looking at this data quite a lot. It may not be true, at all. (See Open Data, Assumptions and Naïvety below.)
The Museum & People Dynamics
We don’t often get to see or know the dynamics and politics that go on within the walls of a museum. It can be such a designed space, all about the art or objects, that often the people who made an exhibition come true are almost entirely invisible. It was a real pleasure to work on this data from MoMA specifically because it isn’t about the art, but about the people. When we first began the project, I was keen to be able to show the art, but that desire was quickly supplanted by interest in, and display of, who was doing what.
One of the visualisations we made was about directors of departments, how long they were directors, and in some cases, showing where people went as they moved around the museum, in some cases in careers spanning 40 years. You can see in this screenshot what we can highlight a single individual as they move around too, so you can see who skipped where and when, like John Elderfield…
It was bordering on titillating to imagine who might have worked together and how such long term tenures really did shape the museum as it is today. But, it’s also crystal clear that a little map like this can reveal nothing about why people moved around. You’ll need to look in the Archives to learn those stories.
MoMA Characters Emerge
I was enjoying the way that showing this kind of data over time helps you spot blobs and trends and gaps in the data. I was interested to try to uncover whether we could show who the key staff were that really got MoMA off the ground in the early years. By taking a role – Curator – and drawing it over time, you can see quickly see who was kicking things off, in this case, the founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., curated 36 exhibitions, and worked there for about 40 years.
Something interesting happens when you change how that list is sorted. We can show the same data, but order by who curated the most exhibitions, to get a really different picture that shows the curators who’ve worked on the most exhibitions, and how much they made in any given year. It’s there that you start to notice the effort of curators like William S. Lieberman, who led three different departments over his career, or Dorothy C. Miller, who worked at the museum for about 30 years, and was head of the Department of Painting and Sculpture for a relatively short time, too. Did they work together? Did they like each other?
We liked this “most appearances” view much more, so set that as the default.
This list view is cool too, when you’re looking at artists. There’s a lot of info squished into that single list view, and the overall impression is mostly that MoMA has an incredible collection full of heavyweights (and very good relationships with collectors and other museums), and shares it with the world a lot! Here are the most exhibited artists in the 1929-1989 data… could you infer Jasper Johns blasted on to the scene at some point there?
One small design thing I introduced was to show a small ♀ symbol in big lists of people, so you could spot women quickly. This revealed a little gap in the data, where gender isn’t always noted. Since perfect is the enemy of good, rather than remove the feature, I’m trying to help by slowly making additions/corrections to a copy of the data, which MoMA is welcome to. (Want to help?)
World War II and The Responsive Museum
Something that piqued my curiosity almost immediately was about how the museum operated in World War II, 1939-1945. They were exhibiting a lot, and browsing 1942 and 1943 in particular, there were clearly lots of exhibitions related to the war.
I first noticed the annual exhibitions called Useful Objects of American Design under $10.00 that opened in 1939, and repeated for a few years thereafter. I found myself wondering if this was austerity-related, but then realised I didn’t know the equivalent of $10 in today’s money! Nevertheless…
With a little further digging beyond our dataset, I quickly discovered that “numerous exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art were produced in collaboration with the United States government,” as it continued to exhibit the very best in modern art, including Starry Night, which MoMA acquired in 1941, and exhibited soon after.
I simply don’t know how data like ours could possibly show that Victor D’Amico chaired the Committee on Art in American Education and Society, which established as “art education’s answer to Fascism and its contempt for creative art. We hope to mobilise the art educators and students of America, combining all their art efforts, large and small, throughout the nation to work for victory.” It’s just one or two steps away from his basic data, and you always have to stop making new columns in data at some point, don’t you?
I have to say it makes me wonder how and if museums in the USA (and elsewhere) are mobilising to produce a “vast program of art activity” in this way to combat the 45th president. Ahem. In any case, I actually removed a bunch of other “this was interesting” and “I enjoyed this” links and stuff. You can find your own way!
What did the critics say?
NATURE and social satire are the themes of two current shows here. Both are important and well worth seeing.
Remember mashups? When publicly accessible code-level interfaces (or APIs) became a thing back in the day, the fantasy was that all manner of mashups could be made to combine and recombine data from all over into compelling new presentations.
One of our early ideas for this spelunker was to try to bring in content from the fabulous New York Timesarchive, a treasure trove of history around New York City and its surrounds from 1851 to the present. We knew that The New York Times regularly reviews events and exhibitions at MoMA, so it was simple step to try to combine that with the MoMA exhibition data. Luckily, too, the MoMA team had already done a lot of the work to connect exhibitions to articles, which was hugely helpful.
Could we show what The New York Times critics said about MoMA through the twentieth century? Yes! Critics such as Edward Alden Jewell, who was watching from the start in 1929, or Jacob Deschin, who often wrote about photography exhibitions from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, also form part of the fabric of the exhibition history at MoMA.
(Note that you can’t see full articles unless you’re a subscriber. We can show first paragraphs, which is a start.)
Open Data, Assumptions & Naïvety
This work for MoMA has been interestingly different from previous spelunkers we’ve made. In other projects, we’ve made exploratory interfaces into object-level metadata, which is (arguably) simply factual, representing objects and their attributes. While there may be errors or omissions in this kind of metadata, each object is as well-described as possible. Sometimes, viewing this data in the aggregate can bring insights — like seeing instantly that prints form the largest group of things by type at the Victoria & Albert Museum — but there’s really not much ‘colour’ to it.
Part of the provocation of the spelunker concept is to challenge the notion that people know what they’re looking for when they encounter a new museum’s collection, and I’m wondering if that could be extended to museum datasets. It seems to me that “drawing” this data makes it easier to hypothesise about and ask questions of than examining a big .CSV file. You follow your instincts or an image that appeals or a person you recognise or a theme you’re into, and, I think, start to form your own opinions pretty quickly. The challenge is that this metadata can be quite rich, but, at least in our experience so far, also pretty superficial, so the picture that’s drawn for you is just a surface view. Perhaps though, it’s like a physical exhibition where you don’t read any labels (or there aren’t any), and you’re left to make your own judgements, some of which may be wrong, but all are personal.
As we were fleshing out the interface to the MoMA spelunker, I found myself making all sorts of assumptions about the institutional dynamics at the museum related to who was working when, and why they might have moved around, their areas of interest or speciality, and things like that. I’d written about some of that sort of stuff on the About page, but the kind folk at MoMA archives were good enough to let me know that some of those assumptions were just plain wrong! Maybe it was more that the data we were able to display only gives you a tiny glimpse into the actual dynamics, and it’s simply a must to explore more deeply with experts or other source material. I don’t want to draw wrong conclusions, and experts in house, who live with this information day to day, surely don’t want to express things that are wrong. Of course not. I think what I’m coming around to is that these sorts of explorers help orient viewers towards questions they’d like to answer, once they’re acclimatised to the terrain. That seems good!
More broadly speaking, we’ve now made six spelunkers at G,F&S, and it’s probably about time I had a proper think about how well they’ve worked and whether they’re useful. More on that later…
The team for this project was George Oates (design, project lead), and Phil Gyford (engineering). Thanks, Phil!
