Origin & Purpose
This data was generated by the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA). Previously an internal database, these records were made open access to the public on CMOA’s 120th anniversary in 2015. While not explicitly noted on the GitHub repository that houses this data, museums are known to keep a record of all the items in their collections through the years for internal tracking and usage, and this was likely the case for CMOA as well. Thus, the original source of this data and the organization that funded the creation of this dataset is also CMOA. Furthermore, since the primary purpose of museums is to collect, preserve, interpret, and display objects of artistic, cultural, or scientific significance for the study and education of the public, a main purpose of curating this dataset can be implied to be under the same intention—for the public to be able to access digitized information about this collection of items. On the repository page, it is noted that the dataset is made open access in order for people to explore different artworks, educate themselves, and investigate the data. The complete dataset released by CMOA contains 28,269 objects from different departments of the museum, such as photography, fine arts, contemporary art, decorative art, and the Heinz Architectural Center. For our project, we are solely focusing on the photography department which contains 3,727 photos, and has the same information as the other departments.
Illuminated Information
Given these various fields, this dataset can illuminate the timeline of which the photographs were taken and acquired by CMOA. From the titles of the photographs, one can likely discern the themes and sentiments of the photographs. The medium of the photograph, combined with the timeline, may possibly provide insight into certain trends in photography over different eras. Since some information about the photographer of each photograph is provided, this dataset can also show common characteristics of the photographers whose work is being shown by CMOA. Combining different types of information in the dataset may then also show what certain types of photographs that CMOA is interested in acquiring and showing. It should also be noted that the web URLs and the image URLs that are provided in the dataset are broken, likely due to a domain name change in the last five years since the repository was first posted.
Missing Items
This source has been shown to be divided into data through categories such as titles, dates, dimensions, funders, among other sections. While CMOA probably did not have biased intentions when creating this dataset and likely sought to gather all the details they considered relevant for educating the public and for their own record-keeping, some information would have undoubtedly been left out because they were considered insignificant or difficult to collect. For example, this dataset lacks certain information related to the context of these photographs, such as the locations that these photographs were taken in. Furthermore, the images themselves will provide insight into what the subjects are, but the titles are not always indicative of the content of the photograph since they are chosen by the photographer per his or her creative freedom. Since the true subject content of the photographs is also missing from this dataset, investigators of this data will lack context into what the photographs actually show, and can only guess based off of the title. Thus, when the titles of the photographs are analyzed to investigate themes, one should remember that the titles may be somewhat arbitrary compared to the actual content of the photographs and should be regarded as a separate piece of information.
Presented Items
For each piece, the title of the photo is mandatorily included (although it may be “unknown”), the date of creation if it is known, the earliest possible creation date, latest possible creation date, the medium of the photo, the accession number assigned to the photo when CMOA took ownership of it, an ID specific to the photo in the entire collection database, crediting information that indicates who or how the photograph was acquired by CMOA, the date the photo was legally acquired by the museum, the department that the object is a part of (in this case, photography), the physical location that the photo is on view or in storage in, the dimensions of the photo (width, height, depth, diameter), a URL that leads to the photograph on the website, the ownership history of the photo, the type of classification of the photo (e.g. books, collages, photographs, prints), a URL to the image, and the information of the creator of the photo (name, nationality, birth date, death date, birth place, death place).
