02. Concept

Creating a concept

At the start of 2020, the Tropenmuseum will open a small permanent setup about the mission and the DNA of the museum. With a combination of objects, models and graphics they'll tell about the colonial origins of the institute and about their collection. This display will explain what their collection contains in an accessible and playful way.

The display contains three components:

1. An interactive model that tells stories about the big and special building.

2. 'The complete collection in one display case': 25 objects that represents the cross section of their entire collection.

3. Wall graphic that through infographics and facts will explain what their collection contains.

The assignment

The assignment my client has given me is the third component of the abovementioned list: Wall graphic that through infographics and facts will explain what their collection contains.

The client wants me to create a display of one of the following four subjects:

1. Top 10 most common materials
2. Top 10 most common categories
3. Top 10 most common keywords
4. Top 10 most common objects/shapes

My school assignment is to make a datavisualisation through the given database. All of the abovementioned subjects seemed quite difficult to accomplish so i chose to find another subject for my assignment.

Concept 1: Japanese swords (Katana's)

For my first concept i wanted to retrieve all katana's and katana parts from the NMVW database and plot these in a barchart. To make the barchart look a little more spicy i would like to make the bars in the shape of a katana's.

Concept 2: Japanese weapons

For my second concept i made a bubblechart out of all the Japanese weapons in the NMVW database. I chose to do a different barchart because i started experimenting with datavisualisations and found out a barchart didn't fit well with the data. These experiments can be found here.

This is also the concept I chose to work with.

Necessities

To create this infographic i will need to make use of:

• My client's database
• D3.js
• Examples of D3
• Functional programming

Making my concept Interactive

To create an interaction for my datavisualisation I started brainstorming about how I could use my existing concept, which was "Japenese weapons of the NMVW collection plotted in a bubble chart", and create an interaction with it. Quickly i came up with the concept of using dynamic queries to compare the weapons of multiple regions in the world with eachother. To realize this concept I had to adjust my SPARQL query so you could select a region and then fetch the data for that specific region which in turn is then plotted into a bubble chart.

Eventually my concept looked like this: