Show HN: Ex Situ – Open-source spatial index of displaced cultural artifacts

Show HN: Ex Situ – Open-source spatial index of displaced cultural artifacts(exsitu.app)

38 points by hbyel 8 hours ago | 25 comments

Hi, I designed and developed a spatial index that maps museum artefacts as connecting arcs/hyperlinks from their origin site to institutional location/sources. The Index specifically looks at western/euro-american institutions and maps their collection categorised by them under Islamic art, Asian/African art, ethnological collections, Middle East, South America etc.

Started as my MA thesis in 2022, kept building since, mostly solo with a little funding. Fully open source, self-hosted, AGPL-3.0, Next.js + Deck.gl on the frontend, Strapi backend, Python ETL pulling from museum open-access APIs. Currently indexing over 100k artifacts from all over the world, across 8 collections (Met, V&A, SMB Berlin). Recently added an md export so researchers can download provenance data for a filtered set of artifacts.

The infrastructure is conceptualized as an indexer, not a hoster. Even images are kept as URLs pointing to the source institutions. It's connective tissue between archives that were never designed to speak to each other, with an origin-first search UI concept. The data model is on purpose flat, to avoid encoding problematic taxonomies, and routes researchers directly to the source giving responsibility to the source institutions rather than duplicating institutional data. It indexes the relationship between origin sites and destination collections.

Coming from a design background, taking this project from prototype to production app has been incredibly rewarding, but honestly it’s getting a little bit overwhelming to scale alone. I would love community’s feedback on performance scaling, any code contributions, data pipelines for missing museum apis or general feedback.

Repo: https://github.com/hburakyel/ex-situ

Live: https://exsitu.app

FelixKunzJr 38 minutes ago |

Is there any way to filter the lines? There are so many lines it's hard to see what's going on. But definitely interesting.

hbyel 15 minutes ago | |

Thanks, you can filter by source in the search panel already.

theroadnotbacon 6 hours ago |

Huh! Was hoping to get, for example, a sense of scale of cultural artifacts stolen from Korea by the Japanese. But I don't see any provenance descriptions for Japanese institutions. Either way, this is super cool. Thank you for sharing this.

hbyel 5 hours ago | |

Fair catch, it only pulls from institutions with open access APIs (Met, V&A, SMB Berlin, AIC). Not aware of an equivalent from Japanese museums, if you know one, happy to add it.

leobg 4 hours ago | | |

In that case, the map looks misleading, doesn’t it? It looks as though London and Berlin, for example, stand out as having dislocated disproportionately many artifacts from around the world. And on the other hand, Paris looks innocent. But in truth, London and Berlin are just being honest about it giving you open access to the data whereas Paris doesn’t. So perhaps it would be better to mark cities that do provide data with, say, a green dot. This also helps the visual understanding of the direction of the transfer. And it would make it clear at a glance that Paris is not innocent, but that Paris is simply lacking data.

txzl 6 hours ago |

I think much more lines should go to Moscow. At least from such places as Crimea. But I see you covered only western/euro-american institutions.

hbyel 5 hours ago | |

Correct, scoped to western/euro-american museums as noted in the post, it’s just where I started. Open to expanding if there’s good open data to pull from.

iamacyborg 6 hours ago |

One day I really should dig up my great great great great grandfather’s[^1] diaries to see first hand how he justified bringing back so much stuff to the UK.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Richard_Hamilton

fkdk 5 hours ago | |

“To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.”

mad_tortoise 2 hours ago | | |

Crap quotes like this is what people use to justify slavery, fascism, genocide, apartheid.

leobg 4 hours ago | |

You know that they exist, you know where they are, and you’ve never read or digitized them? Or was that sarcasm?

iamacyborg 3 hours ago | | |

They’re at my aunts house, I’ve just not had a chance to read them or ask my cousin to digitise them and send them to me.

arendtio 4 hours ago |

> Coming from a design background

From a UX perspective, it is very weird to place the toggle button for the right panel at the top of the left panel... After I gave up to find a way to close the right panel, I found that button a few minutes later, when I looked around for other interactive elements.

hbyel 4 hours ago | |

thanks, agreed, will fix :)

potamic 5 hours ago |

This is fantastic visualization!

I couldn't figure out from the UI but is there a way to filter the map? Say, I only want to see things going out of Cusco or I only want to see where things end up in Berlin?

It would also be nice to have some directionality to the lines to indicate source and destination, perhaps a colour or lightness gradient or something.

hbyel 5 hours ago | |

Thanks! You actually can filter by source already, search lets you filter arcs by place/site. Destination filtering technically works too, via Collections, but that only makes sense while there are a handful, once it’s hundreds it’ll need its own proper destination filter. Good call on the color/gradient distinction for source vs. destination on the arcs too, that’s worth trying.

ahk-dev 4 hours ago | | |

One thing I'd find interesting is the inverse view: instead of starting from a place or artifact, start from a museum and visualize the geographic footprint of its collection. It could make the collection's provenance surprisingly tangible, especially for institutions with very global holdings.

vanyaland 3 hours ago |

How well does the fuzzy matcher resolve provenance text to origin sites? Curious what share of the 200k in the README needed hand correction.

bazzingadev 4 hours ago |

Do you plan on improving the performance of the website ?

warpspeedchic 5 hours ago |

holy gosh, this is brilliant. i've been toggling around this site for a good 40 minutes now. learning so much!!! arrrgggh, i love the internet.

berardino 5 hours ago |

It is truly very useful not only for art history but also for the history of colonial rule

robintiman11 5 hours ago |

Very cool