Artifacts of Colonialist Language
My first experiment using D3. I wanted to explore the idea of colonialism through the use of language on The Met’s website. I spoke with a number of museum writers about the language they avoid when writing copy for exhibitions and narrowed the list down to exotic, primitive and Oriental. I was ready to develop a web scraper then realized The Met has a really robust search function on their website that includes filters for department. The results were both unsurprising and surprising. I expected there to reveal usage of these words but was shocked by the prevalence of the word primitive, and that all but 300 of its 3506 uses appears in the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas department.
Outcomes
D3 ended up being more complicated than I’d hoped. In hindsight I would’ve made this using p5.js and been able to achieve more of my goals regarding interactivity.
This narrative would have worked well as a scrollytelling piece but I didn’t consider that option until it was too late and the project was due. While hte end result of the research is interesting I’m not particularly thrilled with final visualization.
Lessons learned
Adoption of a new technology or process isn’t always a great idea when time is a constraint. That said, its valuable that I’ve learned, first-hand, some differences between D3 and p5.js so I can better evaluate which tool to use in the future. I had a hunch this project wouldn’t be as well resolved as I’d like but I wanted to try something new.
