Trends in Artistic Medium Usage in the Tate Collection (1940–1949)
Introduction to the Project
For this project, I looked at artistic medium usage in the Tate Collection from 1940 to 1949. I wanted to see which materials artists used during that decade and whether those choices changed over time. Instead of just focusing on individual artworks, I tried to look at overall patterns. By comparing the number of artworks in different medium categories each year, I could see which materials were more common and which ones appeared less often. Basically, I wanted to see what seemed popular in different years and what did not, which is why I created a table to show those patterns
Sources
I used the Tate dataset that was provided for the assignment. It includes a lot of detailed information about each artwork and artist, like accession numbers, titles, dates, dimensions, acquisition info, and image links. Most of that was not relevant to what I wanted to study, since my focus was just on medium and year. To clean the data, I removed the columns that were not useful for my question, like identifiers, image links, and physical measurements. Then I focused on the medium column, which needed some cleaning because similar materials were written in different ways or in different orders. I standardized them so they matched. After that, I grouped mediums into broader categories and created a new column for those categories. I ended up with nine medium groups, which made the data much easier to organize and visualize.
Processes
After cleaning the dataset, I used Flourish to make a stacked bar chart. I picked this type of chart because it shows both the total number of artworks each year and how those totals are divided between different mediums, which made the most sense for my project. Each bar represents one year, and each color inside the bar represents a medium category. This makes it easy to compare years and also see which materials take up the biggest share overall. It felt like the clearest way to show change over time without making the chart confusing or hard to understand.
Presentation
I adjusted the chart so it would be easy to read and understand quickly. Each medium category has its own color, and the legend explains what each color means. I also included the numbers inside the bars so viewers can see the exact counts, not just the proportions. The years are arranged in order to keep the timeline clear. Overall, I tried to keep the design simple so that someone could look at the chart and immediately understand what it shows.
Significance
Looking at the data this way makes it easier to see patterns that would be hard to notice by looking at artworks one by one. When everything is grouped by year and medium, you can clearly see which materials appear most often and how that changes over time. From the chart, oil painting and printmaking appear consistently throughout most of the decade, while smaller categories like ceramics and ink appear much less often. That suggests that some materials remained central to artistic production, while others were used more sporadically. This connects to digital humanities because it uses data and visualization tools to study cultural material in a structured way. Instead of interpreting artworks individually, this approach helps show larger trends across a whole collection. It is a different way of looking at art history by focusing on patterns in the data.