Description

As part of a longstanding collaboration with the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), I advise independent studies working with digital humanities and WCMA's artwork data set:

In fall 2018, I advised Lester Lee (Computer Science '19) in an independent study on information visualization. As his final project, he examined the use of visualization in supporting curators, faculty members, and students in exploring, finding, and ultimately selecting artworks from a museum’s collection for teaching and learning. Current exploration tools are largely limited to keyword search, browsing by category, and filtering based upon artwork metadata. The WCMA Explore Tool allows users to visually browse the art museum’s collections based on appearance in exhibitions via a social network visualization, using each art piece’s color palette as its node representation in the visualization.

In fall 2019, I co-advised Michaela Smith (Sociology '20), along with WCMA Postdoctoral Fellow for Digital Humanities, Beth Fischer on a project to visualize the WCMA data collection based upon color. The artwork colors were automatically determined using a cluster analysis, and the visualization was built using the D3 Javascript library with a custom interface implemented for the sepia artworks. This visualization promotes another avenue to explore and discover new artworks using digital tools.

Documentation

Lee, L. (2019) WCMA Explore Tool and accompanying blog posts.

Smith, M. (2020) WCMA: Explore the Collection and accompanying blog posts.