Ex Situ – Open-source spatial index of displaced cultural artifacts
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…
Ex Situ – Open-source spatial index of displaced cultural artifacts launched on July 21, 2026 with 51 votes, #613 of 24,623 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Ex Situ is an open-source spatial index that maps displaced cultural artifacts held in Western and Euro-American museums, showing the connection between their origin sites and current institutional locations. It tracks over 100,000 objects across collections categorized as Islamic art, Asian and African art, ethnological collections, and others from institutions including the Met, V&A, and SMB Berlin. Built with Next.js and Deck.gl, the tool lets researchers download provenance data for filtered artifact sets and pulls information from museum open-access APIs.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Explore the global spatial index of cultural heritage objects. Browse provenance arcs by country, institution, and collection on an interactive map.
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
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