Five millennia of art from around the world

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the world's largest art museums, presents 5,000 years of art. It is located in New York City.

The incredible collection of the Met covers art from all corners of the world, ranging from paintings, prints and decorative arts to textiles, ceramics and musical instruments. Last February the museum introduced its Open Access Policy. This means that both images and data from most objects are made available online. Today about 454,000 records can be searched via the museum’s website: http://www.metmuseum.org/

For our project, Visualizing Visions, we created an interactive visualization that lets you explore the digital collection of the Met. What you see on the left is a random selection of artworks, one per country. After a complete cycle a new selection is automatically loaded.

You can click on a location to move the position of the globe. Also, you can click on associated keywords to alter the selection of objects.

This visualization is part of my ongoing PhD research where I am investigating the use of digital tools for art historical research. For more information, visit my C²DH profile page: https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/people/floor-koeleman