3 ms·
Ha! The data is completely useless. None of it is uniform. Some artists are repeated twice with different names. The dates are totally unusable. The author fiel
by d--b 11y ago
Ha! The data is completely useless. None of it is uniform. Some artists are repeated twice with different names. The dates are totally unusable. The author field may contain one or more authors, etc.
MoMA wanted to look tech-savvy and trendy by publishing this data to github. But it just makes them look like an old institution that doesn't know how to keep their data clean and meaningfully structured. This is a bit sad. Plus Github's really not meant to publish content. Of course you can but it's weird.
Yes, art is hard to classify, but come on... we're talking about one of the richest museums in the world, and they can't properly manage 200k of data? I would be pretty afraid lending them anything...
- zachrose 11y agoI suspect art cataloging has a very specific taxonomy, or even deliberate examples of flaunting taxonomy for artistic reasons. Normalization risks equating Prince and the artist formerly known as Prince, which is a worse picture of reality for a lot of purposes.
- d--b 11y agoI understand it is impossible to make these things fit in a proper relational model. For instance, modeling dates when artworks are made circa a date, between 2 dates, started by someone and finished by someone else, is very complex. That said, they should at least try. Being able to sort artworks by date seems pretty fundamental to me! Look at the data released by the Cooper-Hewitt that someone posted below. They actually have some kind of structure!