This project is a narrative visualization seeking to interpret some of the information that can be obtained by looking at a museum’s collections. The dataset contains about 62,000 records including data like department, type (such as “print” or “jewelry”), and whether the item is on display.

OpenRefine was used to do initial analysis of the data and understand what’s in it. All data processing in the final version is done in the browser using JavaScript and d3. This project was also the second of the museum visualizations I did during my undergrad program at RIT.

One of the most interesting charts in this data was where I started exploring collections growth via accessions. An accession the formal acquisition (regardless of reason, such as donation or purchase) of a museum item when it enters the collections. While there are a lot of reasons this data may not be fully reliable, it can show some general trends about how actively items came into the museum collections.