Wednesday, April 14, 2021

The Danish Map of Art

The National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) has released an interactive map which geolocates over 4,000 artworks. The Kunstens Danmarkskort allows you to find paintings which depict locations across the whole of Denmark. Click on any of the markers on the map and you can view how that location has been depicted by an artist who is featured in the National Gallery.

Using the map is a great way to explore the museum's works of art by location. My one quibble with the map is that despite using the Google Maps API the map has Google Street View disabled. While exploring the paintings on the map I would love to be able to open up Google's panoramic imagery to compare the artist's depiction of a scene with the modern view, as captured by Google. 

What I do really like about the map is that when you open an image you can zoom in and out and pan around to explore the chosen painting in close detail. I also like the fact that each image has its own unique URL which you can copy to share a direct link to the painting on the map.

Each painting on the map also includes a 'Suggest a new position' link. To geolocate the artworks the SMK used a Named Entity Extraction technique to find place-names within the titles of the museum's 250,000+ paintings. This method has led to a few errors - where paintings have been placed in the wrong position on the map. The SMK has been engaging with local Facebook groups and local newspapers in order to help find wrongly positioned artworks on the map and discover where they should be located. If you know that a painting is in the wrong location you can use the 'Suggest a new position' link to tell SMK where the painting should be located instead.

You may also like these interactive art maps:

Ukiyo-e Map - an interactive map of geo-located prints by the Japanese artist Hiroshige
Place to Paint - the interactive map for artists to share the locations where they paint and the artworks which they have created at those locations
Watercolor World- a global map of watercolours painted before 1900

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