What do 300,000 museum objects look like when you map them by meaning? A galaxy.

What do 300,000 museum objects look like when you map them by meaning? A galaxy.

I embedded every object in LinkedCulture (300,000+ works across 8 institutions) and let them arrange themselves by what they actually are, not by who made them or when. The result is an explorable star map of 1,653 semantic clusters.

Zoom way into any part of the map and explore the pins which represent semantic clusters of objects. Nearby pins are actually related to the first, mathematically. Tap any cluster to see its objects, every one linking back to its home museum. It’s early and rough around the edges, but it’s live and you can explore it now. Don’t forget to zoom in to see the cluster pins!

Explore the galaxy: https://galaxy.linkedculture.org/

The research behind this series is documented in several papers: Paper 1: Discovery architecture for cultural heritage: layered retrieval, institutional authority, and the limits of keyword search https://linkedculture.org/research/discovery-architecture-for-cultural-heritage

Paper 2: Discovery architecture for cultural heritage: layered retrieval, institutional authority, and the limits of keyword search https://linkedculture.org/research/embedding-cultural-heritage-metadata

Paper 3: Semantic Clusters and Language Partitioning in a Multi-Institutional Cultural Heritage Index https://linkedculture.org/research/semantic-clusters-language-partitioning

Learn more about LinkedCulture and the work behind it: https://linkedculture.org/