Maritime memorials, visualised

• We have relatively well-structured data but it’s often poorly exploited - behind post forms, session-bound, limited browse options, assumes specialist knowledge

• Direct export of data from MIMSY XG to KML template.• Digitized over 200 relics of Sir John Franklin, who disappeared while trying to find the

North-West Passage in 1848.• The objects are difficult to 'read' in isolation - for example, there are pork bones,

broken glasses and discarded bibles, which seemingly do not relate to one another. • The objects are really only interesting in the context of the expedition.• We had geographical metadata: place found. Needed to add lat/long for each of the

sites by hand• Google maps provided an obvious way to:

– To link objects to places– To show the relation (and distances) between the places

• Added benefit:– Satellite view to show the barren nature of the land and - topically - the recent thawing of the

North-West Passage

Background• We digitised over 200 relics of Sir

John Franklin, who disappeared while trying to find the North West Passage in 1848

• The objects are difficult to ‘read’ in isolation - pork bones, cutlery and broken glasses...

• Google Maps provided an obvious way to:

– link objects to places– show the distances between the

places

• Added benefit:– satellite view reveals the barren

nature of the land and, topically, the recent thawing of the North West Passage

Brings the expedition to life. Tells a story

• Commissioned Stamen Design to create a dramatic visualisation of our maritime memorials data, as a research project

• We provided 12 CSV files and no other documentation

• We hoped that Stamen’s work would make the argument for visualisations as a creative approach to museum data:– beautiful and engaging– show the data at different levels or in new contexts– let people manipulate the view to see what’s most relevant to them– are provocative rather than conclusive, raise questions– appeal to different learning styles (e.g. visual), and broader audiences– and the most successful ones take people deeper into the data than they

would have otherwise gone

• Asked Stamen to feedback on what would be required from us to effectively release such non-collections data-sets in a suitable format for creative re-use

• Short project, with less than a month of focused work

Project overview

Stamen‘Show everything’‘Start with the obvious’- maps - timelines

• Extracted 1500 (inconsistent) place descriptions and ordered them by popularity

• Used BatchGeocode.com to generate quick latitude/longitude results for the majority of places

• Wrote simple scripts to use the geocoders available at Google Maps and Geonames.org to fill in the blanks

• Only 35 places remained. To clean them up individually, we could use getlatlon.com, Wikipedia and Google search

Geocoded 5000 records, quickly

Stamen “A project is usually finished when it shows people something

nobody has seen before... or asks new questions”

‘Mine the implicit data to find meaningful patterns and representations’

In this case, mine the transcripts of the memorials for recurring words and phrases

‘Find the primary objects and link them’

In this case, connect the memorials through the words they share...

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Many outcomesNew outputs:• ‘Memorial explorer’ for the website and/or display on-gallery• KML file of maritime memorials• API to the transcripts, e.g. http://www.nmm.ac.uk/memorial-explorer/

api/phrases.php?phrase=memory

Better understanding of our data:• Geocoded• Popular phrases • New connections between transcripts

Proof that if you want to release your data for creative re-use, then even CSV files are probably good enough

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Data enhancement• Curation• Standards• Machine mark-up (e.g. Calais)• Social tagging (e.g. Flickr Commons)• Combining data-sets (e.g. ‘mash-ups’)• ...

• A ‘treatment’ by artists working with data (e.g. Stamen)

Love your data• Itʼs relatively well-structuredItʼs ʻvast and deepʼItʼs specialist and interestingCan present new challenges for designers - finding something new in well-structured data

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Love your data• It’s relatively well-structured already• It’s ‘vast and deep’• It’s interesting

• And there are unrevealed opportunities to be explored by creative technologists

Maritime memorialswww.nmm.ac.uk/memorial-explorer/ (soon)www.nmm.ac.uk/memorials

Stamen http://stamen.com/

Questions FRomeo@nmm.ac.uk