Final Project Pitch: Olympic Artistic Statistics

This pitch refines some of the general ideas I presented a few weeks ago when introducing my research on the Olympic Art Competitions. As I mentioned then, I would be happy to steer this project in different directions based on whatever interests there might be among other teammates who would want to join me, but for now, I’ve worked out the following proposal for a connected game and website.

The problem that I propose to address is the following: why were certain works or artists successful in the Olympic Art Competitions? I want to pose this question not only to my research team, but also to others learning about the competitions for the first time.

Approach

As such, I want to draw a general audience into the database of the site by way of a game of our own: a quiz that acts as the invitation to the more informational pieces of the site. Users will see a set of artworks from a given year and guess which ones won gold, silver, bronze, or nothing. Players will get scored based on how well they did and then get to see the real results.

The home page, then, of the non-gaming site, will be a podium page, allowing visitors to see the winners for different years and categories. To learn more about why these particular works might have been successful, we’ll construct pages that isolate certain variables…

- A Map page. This interactive heat map will show who competed and who succeeded when different nations were hosting the Olympic Games. It will also be able to show where the judges came from, in different years.

- A Works page. Using statistics from my scrape, this page will chart the importance of certain topics and styles (sports depicted; nationalist vs. internationalist themes; classical vs. modern forms; etc.) for the content of individual works

- An Artists page. Using analysis of the text of the “Bios” provided for most of the artists on sports-reference.com, this page will try to determine trends among the winners and losers—before and after they chose to compete in the Olympics.

One challenge of this project that I should mention is that, while I have scans, photos, and downloads of many Olympic art submissions, I do not have explicit permissions to use any of them. I would have to learn a bit more about fair-use rules to see what would be publishable online.

Audience

In my dissertation, I’m approaching these Olympic Art Competitions from an interest in modernism, and I’m orienting my work toward other modernists. Here, though, I’d prefer to create a website that’s inviting for any enthusiast of art history, the Olympics, or sports: I’m imagining a general audience, from those who know a little about the arts of the early twentieth-century to those simply interested in an odd curiosity of the early Olympic Games.

Skills Needed

The necessary skills for this project would include web design with a few simple interactive features, quiz-game programming (for the first step of the project), some mapping (in keeping with the projects we’ve done already), possible basic text-analysis for trends and correlations (for the Bios section), and a good design sense for displaying art images (for the game and the Podium page in particular).

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