Show HN: Ex Situ – open-source spatial index of displaced cultural artifacts
A developer has launched 'Ex Situ,' an open-source spatial index that maps the provenance and current locations of displaced cultural artifacts held in Western institutions. The project uses a Next.js frontend and Python-based data pipelines to connect museum archives that were previously siloed.
Why it matters
It provides a digital infrastructure for researchers to track the movement of cultural heritage, promoting transparency in museum collections.
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 museum open-access APIs. Currently indexing over 100k artifacts from all over the world, across 8 collections (Met, V&A, SMB Berlin). Recently added an md export so researchers can download provenance data for a filtered set of artifacts.
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