Sources

I used the dataset for this project from the Tate gallery in England. This raw data includes the artwork titles, the artists, the years of creation, the properties, and the artworks’ online resources.

To Download data:

Processes

To acquire clean data, I utilized the application OpenRefine. The software helped me to unify the format of the year the artworks were created by applying regular expressions in data transformation. I then manually removed the untitled paintings to make the data easier for comprehension.

Later, I realized the online URLs for each artwork contain redundancies other than the image of the paintings. To acquire the URLs for the pictures, I wrote a python crawling program to crawl all the URLs.

After all the operations, I uploaded the information I wanted to show in the timeline, including artwork titles, the names of the artists, creation years, and the URLs of the images to a google sheet and shared it to the Timeline, and generated a timeline. 

import csv
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open('corrected.csv', newline='') as csvfile:
    reader = csv.DictReader(csvfile)
    for row in reader:
        url=row['url']
        resp = requests.get(url)
        resp.encoding = "utf-8"
        main_page = BeautifulSoup(resp.text, "html.parser")
        sections = main_page.find_all("article", class_="artwork")
        for section in sections:
            img = section.find_all("noscript")
            if img==[]:
                print("No Image")
            else:
                img=str(img[0])
                print(img.split('"')[-2:-1][0])

Presentation

After acquiring the timeline, I embedded the interactive timeline into the website’s main page so that users do not need to search for it. I also wrote a brief instruction to avoid any misinterpretation. 

Significance

I think this project is a good foundation for further research. The timeline contains artworks from multiple artists. If one is interested in studying how one specific artist changed their art style in the period, he can apply the same method I have done to the artworks of that particular artist. Also, if more data is available, people can find out how aesthetics changed in that period.