About

Hello! I'm Roger Wilson, a third year UCLA student pursuing a Data Theory major and Digital Humanities minor.

Over the summer, I taught myself web scraping. With the Python Package BeautifulSoup, I extracted information on the 2004 artworks in the Fowler Museum's digital collection, with information on:

  1. title
  2. piece
  3. artist
  4. group
  5. place of origin
  6. date/era
  7. materials used
  8. dimension
  9. acquisition credit
an example of a complete artwork description

Not every artwork had every attribute available. For example, if an artwork was relatively old and couldn't be geographically located, they were more likely to be missing an artist and group as well.

The data also needed to be cleaned. A fair amount of attributes were mislabeled or mispelled (which is at fault of the web scraping process and not the Fowler's website). After cleaning the data in Excel, I created my visualizations in Tableau.

It's imporant to note that the Fowler Museum's digital collection only includes 2,004 of the thousands of owned artworks. According to their website, "The Fowler’s collections comprise more than 120,000 art and ethnographic and 600,000 archaeological objects"! For example, a current exhibition displays hundreds of German and European silverware, none of which are published online.