| --- |
| license: cc-by-4.0 |
| language: |
| - en |
| - zh |
| tags: |
| - art |
| - museums |
| - cultural-heritage |
| - multilingual |
| pretty_name: Artable |
| size_categories: |
| - 10M<n<100M |
| configs: |
| - config_name: artwork |
| data_files: artwork.parquet |
| default: true |
| - config_name: artist |
| data_files: artist.parquet |
| --- |
| |
| # Artable |
|
|
| Artwork records digitally published by museums and cultural institutions across the |
| **UK, Europe, the Americas and Asia**, harvested from each institution's own API or |
| open-data endpoint and normalised into one schema. |
|
|
| ## Scope of this release |
|
|
| **Every row in this release has a picture.** The working catalogue holds 23,010,062 records; |
| the 5,604,792 with no image reference are held back for a later release rather than shipped |
| as rows a reader cannot look at. Nothing was deleted — they return when they have pictures. |
|
|
| ## Configs |
|
|
| Two configs, because the two tables have different schemas. Without this file Hugging Face |
| concatenates both Parquet files into a single split, and the schema conflict breaks the |
| search API. |
|
|
| | config | rows | one row is | |
| |---|---|---| |
| | `artwork` (default) | 17,405,270 | an artwork, with an image reference | |
| | `artist` | 56,989 | an artist, with a biography | |
|
|
| Join on `artwork.artist` = `artist.name`. |
|
|
| ## artwork |
|
|
| `id`, `title`, `title_lang`, `title_zh`, `title_alt`, `artist`, `artist_zh`, `year_start`, |
| `year_end`, `date_display`, `medium`, `category`, `institution`, `institution_zh`, `city`, |
| `country`, `region`, `accession`, `image_url`, `thumb_url`, `iiif`, `image_commons`, |
| `image_commons_credit`, `license`, `source_url`, `description`, `description_zh`, `history`, |
| `story`, `story_zh`. |
|
|
| ## artist |
|
|
| `name`, `name_zh`, `story`, `story_zh`, `story_lang`, `story_url`, `born`, `died`, `works`. |
|
|
| `story_lang` matters: 11,952 biographies exist only in French, German, Italian or Japanese. |
| The column says which language the text is actually in, so a French article is never |
| presented as though it were written or translated for this dataset. |
|
|
| ## Honest limits |
|
|
| Stated plainly, because a catalogue that overstates itself is worse than a smaller one. |
|
|
| - **Unknown is `null`.** No accession number, licence, language tag or date is ever inferred. |
| - **Chinese titles are marked by provenance.** A title in `title_zh` is one the museum itself |
| published. Machine-translated titles are held in a separate column and labelled in the app; |
| they are never merged into `title_zh`. |
| - **40.2% of works carry a Traditional Chinese title**, almost all machine-translated through |
| a judged pipeline (each batch is graded by an independent reader and written only on a |
| pass). The remainder are untranslated, not silently left in their source language under a |
| Chinese label. |
| - **"Story" is three different things.** 7,812,526 works carry the museum's own description or |
| curator's comment, 2,398,011 more reach a biography of their artist — but only **4,256** |
| have a narrative about that specific object. Do not read the aggregate as the last number. |
| - **1,301,017 rows had an artist value that named nobody** — "Okänd", "Ingen uppgift", |
| "Onbekend / Unknown (Fotograaf)", "vermeld op object" — in 22 languages. These are now |
| `null` so that "unknown" is not presented as a person's name. Values carrying a real |
| attribution ("Anonymous British", "Unbekannt (Stecher)" where a nationality or role adds |
| information) were kept. |
| - **192,623 rows carry a raw URI in the `artist` column** instead of a name |
| (`http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q…`). These are unresolved identifiers, a known defect, |
| not names. Do not treat them as artist labels. |
| - **Coverage is uneven by source, not by harvest.** Several institutions cap paging while |
| reporting success; where a page could not be retrieved it is recorded as a gap rather than |
| silently dropped. |
|
|
| ## Images |
|
|
| **Not included, and must not be mirrored.** Rows carry `image_url` / `iiif` pointing at the |
| holding institution, which is both the licensing position and why this dataset is ~1.1 GB |
| rather than terabytes. |
|
|
| ## Attribution |
|
|
| Attribution obligations travel with the data — Europeana, Joconde and Palissy require it. |
| Every row carries `institution` and `license`; keep those columns. |
|
|
