About the Project:

This website was created as the final project for the Digital Humanities 201 class at UCLA taught during the Winter quarter by Professor Miriam Posner.

Sources, Processed, Presented

Sources:
The main dataset used for this project was obtained from the Tate Gallery in London. The dataset includes information about 4,393 unique items created by J.M.W. Turner. The items include everything from unfinished sketches to exhibited oil paintings and watercolors. The vast majority of the items encompassed by the dataset (4,321 of the 4,393) were obtained by the British nation as part of the Turner Bequest of 1856. See 'Method of Acquistion' visualization in the "Afterlife of an Artist" section for further details. Additional data sources were obtained from the Tate website, including information about works Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy. All artwork included in the website is the property of the Tate except where credited otherwise. The works listed in the bibliography were consulted for research and background information.

Processed:
Although the dataset from the Tate comprises over 4,000 works this represents only a partial sample of the more than 30,000 unique extant works from Turner’s lifetime. For some data analyses it was necessary to clean and refine the data, or focus on a smaller subset of data within the larger dataset. For the visualization about Venice and Rome in 'Turner on Tour', the data was analyzed and cleaned; only those works representing those two cities were included in the dataset used for visualization. For the visualizaiton about the use of various media in the 'Methods and Techniques' section, it was necessary to clean the data as well. The dataset included over 50 different types of mixed media, so these numerous subcategories were subsumed into four broader categories. More information about the process can be found in that section

Presented:
Any presentation of data or information involves choices and this project was no exception. There were numerous options for how to present the information that had to be considered. As his work is so visually stunning I chose to use images of his work as backdrops for the website whenever possible. At times it was necessary to put filters of varying levels of darkness on the paintings in order to allow the text to be more visible and readable. I incorporated interactive elements like timelines, story maps and slider tools whenever it was possible.

The website is hosted on Github.
Mobirise, which offers free web-building software, was used to design site.
The timelines, story map and slider tool were completed using Knight Lab’s free storytelling web tools.
Voyant Tools was used for making word cloud.
Flourish, an online data visualization and storytelling tool, was used for making several visualizations including tree graph.

About the “Author”

This site was put together by Keith Locantore.
He is a first year MLIS student in the Information Studies Department at UCLA.
It is his first time creating a website or using data visualization tools of any sort really (so go easy on him).