One-Bun Court Lady’s Journey

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Above: embedded code for our map, courtesy of arcGIS’s Instant App configuration. I’m not sure if this makes the map visible here or if it will stand as decoration SO…

Below: a link to our map, and an image of what the link will pull up, in case the above code is rendered fruitless.

OUR MAP

When Will, Griffin, and I sat down with the existing data on our funerary object, Tomb Figure of a Court Lady with One Bun, I think we were all a little collectively confused on how we would map such ambiguity. We knew the statuette’s journey began with its creation in central/eastern China some time between 618 and 907 AD (during the Tang Dynasty of the Chinese Empire), and that the journey would inevitably end in Northfield, MN, but the stops it made along the way were more up in the air.

The present data listed that the artwork made 3 more stops along its journey to the Weitz, but some details were still missing. Fortunately, we knew the second stop was in Central Hong Kong on September 9, 1998 when the object was sold. It was then imported to California on an unknown date, and later gifted to someone at an unknown location on July 1, 2020. This created a number of questions we had to face. Where in California was the object imported to? And when? Where was it gifted? To whom was it gifted? What direction did it travel in?

We ended up including the date of importation as “post 1998 and pre 2020,” to be safe, and we set the location as San Francisco, a major Californian port. We then knew the statuette was gifted to Carleton by Laura Larson, a Carleton alum who appeared to be from Santa Monica when we did a brief Google search on her. Therefore, our map shows the object moving between SF and the LA coastline before making its final voyage to MN. As for directionality, we were forced to make a decision we believed was correct but arcGIS didn’t want to let us do it…

Among the several challenges we faced during this process was the fact that when we tried to connect points overseas with a line, arcGIS kept automatically saying the object’s route HAD to be a westward one. In other words, the program wanted the object to have traveled from Central Hong Kong over the rest of Asia, Africa/Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, America, and finally landed in CA. This was very unreasonable, and we ended up needing to segment our line so that it follows a path right next to a lot of the data points, but doesn’t pass squarely through many of them to avoid the route being diverted. This creates the presented path: a shorter voyage from Hong Kong across the Pacific. Additionally, we were unable to change the symbols of individual data points, which I know must be possible and was disappointed to not figure out. The program set the symbol for each point collectively as whatever we chose (in this case, a red flag), but didn’t offer the option to change Hong Kong’s flag to green, SF’s to blue, LA’s to yellow, and MN’s to checkered as we had hoped. In the end, the map is still easy to follow and the journey is visualized as clear as we could have hoped for.

All in all, we had a great time struggling through this the same way we did through the photogrammetry lab. It’s cool to think this work of art was erected over a thousand years ago, and then just over the last 25 years it’s made a lengthy voyage between households, collections, and international boundaries. I appreciate the power of arcGIS in being able to visualize this journey and the interactive abilities the program holds. Had our object had more data connected to it (i.e., at each location), we would have made it a more interactive experience; one where users can visualize the change by clicking on different data points and seeing consistent change from place to place, as opposed to just where the object was at any given point in time. I think at an elementary level, arcGIS affords people this exact opportunity: the ability to map change. Advanced use of the app comes down to the complexity of one’s data and one’s desire to create a particular kind of visualization. While we had very simple data and a clear goal, others might not have one or the other, and arcGIS offers such a wide array of styles and options to choose from that I would be much more overwhelmed if I had a more complex data set to map.