
Show HN: The Met in pictures – Five millennia of art from around the world - floorkoeleman
http://visualizingvisions.com/metglobe/experiment/
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brianjoseff
Hey this is really cool! Thanks for putting it together.

There are obviously so many directions you could go with an active
visualization and exploration experience for this data set.

My question for you then, is--what are you trying to enable your visual
explorers to do better? How specific can you be in articulating what "problem"
you want to solve for them?

E.g., Maybe you believe that art researchers or "visual explorers", whomever
fits your target user here, need to be able to more swiftly filter the
collection along different dimensions and then see the results grouped by
country so as to see commonalities across countries that weren't apparent
before. If so, that will inform how you design the interactive visualization.

With your current version, I would think more about the tag/filtering
experience. Current behavior--when I click a tag, I'm forced to sit and watch
it cycle through items with the same tag.

Forcing a user to play along at a certain speed is generally an issue, unless
of course there is a narrative that is inextricably bound to such temporal
constraints, and wouldn't make sense without them.

Great work though! Thanks for sharing.

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floorkoeleman
Hey brianjoseff,

Thank you for the kind words. I am an art historian currently doing a PhD
where I investigate the use of digital methods for art historical research. So
my usual work is more academic in nature. In the meantime though, I work
closely together with a developer and we like to create all sorts of
visualizations, put together datasets, etc.

For The Met Globe we actually just wanted to create something nice for a large
touch screen setup we have in our department. So the idea is that when people
sit down for coffee and chat, they might get (un)consciously inspired by
beautiful historical artefacts. There is a picture of setup on my twitter
account:
[https://twitter.com/FloorKoeleman/status/908239636660736001](https://twitter.com/FloorKoeleman/status/908239636660736001)

Floor

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brianjoseff
Ah! then the passive looping is probably great for stimulating (un)conscious
inspiration. Good luck with your PhD!

