This ArcGIS Web Map I made for this project presents the heat map of artists born between 1920 and 1939 from the United Kingdom, layered on top of the population density of the UK from 2015.
The data of the artists were publicly available and provided by my DGAH 110 instructor Austin Mason. The original data included all artists achieved by tate.ork.uk born between 1920 and 1939. The Population Density layer was from a public ArcGIS map, made by ESRI.
The artist data was processed with OpenRefine and Excel. Because the organization was based in UK, only data of artists born in the UK were selected to reflect the population density distribution of those artists. Most of the data clean up used functions such as text facets on OpenRefine, assisted by some basic Python code. Seven entries were also manually deleted (6 for unspecific birth place and 1 for incorrect birth year). The final dataset included information of 209 UK-born artists.
The processed data was presented on the ArcGIS Web App embedded above, in the form of a heat map. Regions with higher artist density are marked with darker and larger highlighting. To contrast this artist density with one of the general population, a public map layer of the 2015 population density was used as the background as reference.
According to the UK National Archives, the data of the 1931 census was destroyed in a 1942 fire. With those data destroyed and the 1941 census that not conducted due to WWII, estimating the UK population distribution of that time period is challenging. Although the 209 artists based on the collection from tate.org.uk is by no means a wholistic reflection of the distribution of the general UK population back then, this comparison still offers insights to general trends of the population distribution to fill the hole.
