Parsons The New School: Major Studio 1 (Fall 2019)

This repo is for Major Studio 1; for a Masters in Data Visualization course at The New school. The data set was the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The MET) open access collection.

View this as a github web page.

Project 1: Quantifying the MET collection

This project explores what the entire MET collection consists of and how much of it is there.

This project explores the entire collection and ways to show quantities and distributions of various parameters using R and D3. Various ways were explored to present all the data compactly on one screen. A packed bar chart was finally used to optimize screen space and allow further exploration.

The Github repo and process documentation for this project is located here.

The project webpage can be found here.

Project 2: Evolution of Arms and Armor

This project explores how medieval foot soldier arms and armor evolved throughout the centuries.

This project focuses on foot soldier helmets and weapons at the MET and groups these objects through time and categories in order to compare which objects existed during the same time period. The original evolution of arms and armor from Dean Bashford was used as inspiration and implemented in a narrative chart originally inspired by XKCD comics.

Please refer to the Github repo and process documentation for the full details.

The project website is located here.

Project 3: Aerophones (wind instruments)

This project explores the Aerophone (wind instrument) family tree; what different types and subtypes are at the MET.

An interactive segmented radial hierarchy tree was constructed using Aerophone classification parameters. These were then grouped into a hierarchical structure that allows the user to explore this hierarchy while showing examples of the collection corresponding to these instrument types. An interactive exploration of air column length was also implemented in P5.js to illustrate how instrument air column length affects instrument frequency.

The link to the Github repo and process documentation is here.

The project website is located here.

Project 4: Aerophone family tree sculpture

This project explored the Aerophone (wind instrument) hierarchy at the MET through construction of a physical 3D wire tree sculpture.

The previously generated data set was converted to a linear hierarchical tree to facilitate wire tree construction. Wires were grouped and shaped according to the data structure categories and these were mounted to a wooden base. Labels were added for each individual type of item and colour coded according to object length (size).

Herewith is the link to the Github repo and process documentation.

Wire Tree	Views

A video presentation of the sculpture is available here on vimeo.

The University course github page is located here.