Imagine my absolute delight when we were told our day #3 for dashboard week would entail fetching data from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s API. I enjoy the visual arts and going to the Met someday is one of my dreams.
So for this particular dashboard, I did not take long to decide what I wanted my focus to be. It would be the impressionists: those trailblazing artists of the 19th Century that broke away from the academic style of painting and went on to create impressionism – a style of painting characterised by different brush strokes, portrayal of everyday life and using ambient light to their advantage in their work.
Making the API call
But first, I needed to check if the Met would have enough impressionist work. I was almost certain that it would, but I checked nonetheless. So I made an API call with “impressionism” as the end-point. It showed that there were more than 600 impressionist objects in the Met, enough to make a decent dashboard.I then fetched all the data related to those 600 objects in Alteryx and outputted them as an excel which I connected to Tableau.
Dashboard layout & design
I decided to play around with the look and feel of the dashboard for this particular project simply because it felt like the subject allowed me to experiment. Afterall, we were talking about art.
So I decided to make the dashboard look like a poster. Instead of creating KPI cards or BANS, I decided to embed the numbers in text. So the initial part of the dashboard is textual with an introduction to impressionism, links to external resources and calculated fields that tell us how many impressionist objects and artists the Met houses.
The span of an artist’s work can ebb and flow. I wondered if the Met has enough material to show us any patterns. Also, sometimes museums collect works from a specific period of an artist’s life. So I made a bar chart plotting the time in years and the number of objects the Met has for each year, grouped by artist. So I made a simple bar chart for this.
We can see that the Met has a rather impressive collection of Charles Francis D from 1862. I added the functionality to click on a specific part of the bar chart they can be redirected to the web page about the artist.
Below this bar chart I created a scatter of the medium in which the artist worked. I was curious to know if artists had certain favourite media over others. For example, did an artist who worked with oil on canvas ever worked with watercolour?
The scatter showed the distribution of every title in the database against the media used. Clicking on each also opens the image on a webpage object below. So the user can view the stunning work of art.
At the end I also added a webpage object on which the image of the selected artwork will appear, concluding my dashboard.
