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

The update

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.

The impact

Started as my MA thesis in 2022, kept building since, mostly solo with a little funding. gl on the frontend, Strapi backend, Python ETL pulling from museum open-access APIs.

The show backdrop

Currently indexing over 100k artifacts from all over the world, across 8 collections (Met, V&A, SMB Berlin)

Where this fits in Signal Ledger

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Our show read

gl on the frontend, Strapi backend, Python ETL pulling from museum open-access APIs. The infrastructure is conceptualized as an indexer, not a hoster.