Olympic Map Team Preliminary Plan

We’ve decided to combine aspects of the Olympic Art Competitions project, the Warpmap, and some curated images. Our plan is to create an interactive world map that represents the span of the Olympic contests, using metadata in spreadsheets that we already have and some new metadata that we’ll need to input. For now, our concept is that we’ll use the Warpmap to visualize the tiers of success for certain Olympic entries (gold, silver, bronze, honorable mention, nothing, “hors concours” [i.e. for display only, not in contest]). When a user selects a certain city or submission, she’d be able to see an image or a text passage from that submission. So, while we’re not doing a gallery curation system like the other class group, we’ll still make use of some of the visuals and literature that Miles has stored up.

Need/question: We’re pitching this partly as a specific visualization for the Olympic Art Competitions, but also as a tool that could theoretically be applied to other mapping data. For example, to take Thatcher’s original pitch as a model, one could imagine ranking news articles from specific cities according to gold, silver, and bronze levels of importance, based on clicks or shares or being front-page, etc. This is a tool that teaches us, for now, about the global arts scene in the twentieth century by means of one particular worldwide contest; and in the future, it could be a tool for visualizing different kinds of tiered information that’s geographically specific.

Approach: After adding new metadata from the Olympic exhibition catalogues by typing in cities for participating artists, we’ll have all the material we need to begin coding, designing, and presenting. Miles will be able to generate a lot of the text- and image-content of our eventual site, with descriptions and contextualization. Yuchuan will be our point-person for design and aesthetics. Kelsey and Thatcher can divide up or collaborate on the coding aspects. And Ece should be able to help us with questions of how best to present this archive and its details.

Intended audience: Insofar as this prototype is Olympics-focused, we expect our audience to be twofold: first, academics interested in modern art and literature, who will recognize certain names and styles and stories while finding new, interesting inquiries on the twentieth century’s globalized art world; second, a public that is generally interested in the Olympics and may not know that they used to have art contests, for whom this will be an introduction.