Death of Artists
1944-2012
Introduction
For my midterm, I wanted to do something surrounding data visualization. The most interesting data visualization that we looked at during class was of the atomic bomb testing throughout the world, where we could see when and where the bombs were detonated. When looking at the datasets, I found the artists’ death and birth dataset to be the most interesting, but I chose to look specifically at death because, as humans, it is something we avoid talking about. I wanted to plot out every artist’s death using the data set on an illustrated timeline of the world. I used Flourish to complete this data visualization because it had a very straightforward approach to adding the cleaned data and creating a robust data visualization.
Sources
The artists’ data was interesting to me because having the start and end of someone’s life displayed as data in a Google Sheet was really uncanny, and mapping out their deaths seemed like a way to humanize the data. I cleaned the data first by removing null values using a filter. Then, I organized the death locations with their corresponding latitude and longitude. Finally, I added the corresponding CSV file to Flourish, ensured that each column was connected to the correct feature, and created the skeleton of the illustrated timeline you see above. Here is a Google Sheet of the cleaned artist data that I used to create the Flourish illustrated timeline.
Process
I wanted to use Flourish because it had the most options for personalizing my data visualization to properly present my data in an easy to digest way. I chose to use a illustrated timeline because it allowed for us to see the changes of where artists died, while it does not seem significant at first seeing the location of artists deaths tell you about where significant artists may have brought their art style and its possible influences on the region of where they died.
Presentation
I chose to display my project using a Wordpress because I felt most comfortable using the Wordpress features. I also felt confident that I could properly use all Wordpress features to properly display my graphics and order information in a clear and concise manner. The illustrated timeline helps push a narrative of the shifts of artistic movements overtime and helps invoke a personal feeling in the viewer because some of the deaths may be close to home and show viewers that important figures in art may have passed in their very own backyard.
Significance
What we can gain from my project is insight into the movement of artistic trends and the clusters where these movements occur. The death of an artist does not necessarily signify the death of a movement, but instead could signify the start of an artistic movement as well. These deaths could also represent historic shifts in where the cultural centers of the world are and how they have changed over the years. I could have better shown the shift in artistic movement by color-coding each death with its respective artistic movement, but I was unable to match each artist to a general movement, so it was tough to visualize. The dataset that I used to model these deaths was also very Western Hemisphere-centric and was not representative of other cultures and their own art styles; being able to illustrate all cultures would be more representative of a DH approach.
This approach is related to DH because it allows for a more in-depth analysis beyond just data science. As I mentioned above, this illustrated timeline lets us analyze the shifts in the movements of artists, and if there were more data about each artist, we could see shifts in artistic movements. This analysis promotes a discussion not just of the deaths of artists, but also of where artistic centers were located and how these centers may have shifted over time.