My original research topic has always been the same since starting this project: How did the lotus flower motif spread and transform across ancient cultures through trade and religious exchange, and what does its cultural diffusion reveal about cultural interaction in the ancient world? However, I had an interest in a different topic on looted/unrepatriated items in museums, but had to change the trajectory of my research because of the lack of accessibility/information on the topic that is publicly available. I chose to study the cultural diffusion of the lotus motif because I love learning about art, museums, cultural interaction, and diffusion, especially in the ancient world.
I had to create my own dataset by searching through museums' digital collections, looking for items across different cultures that had prominent representations of the lotus flower motif. Most of the artifacts I analyzed came from The British Museum, The Met, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, but there are also artifacts from The Art Institute of Chicago, the Grand Egyptian Museum, and the National Museum of Korea. I chose artifacts from these websites because they all had a large available collection with proper information, including descriptions, material, original location, and dates of the artifacts. Many museum websites that I was on while looking for data were not updated, had a limited collection, or only provided a photo and name of artifacts, this is one limitation that my data collection and project faced.
I created a spreadsheet for all of my artifact data containing the artifact name, the original location of the artifact, a description, material made from, date it was created, the culture it belonged to, the current location of the artifact (which museum it can be seen in) and my analysis of the artifact asking: How does the lotus form and meaning stay the same, evolve, or change?
I chose to use Flourish to create my interactive map for this website because I wanted to use spatial mapping to show the true geographic bounds within which the lotus flower motif was diffused. Creating the map was very challenging and time-consuming for me, as I have little experience in coding, but I was eventually able to figure it out and also upload images into each artifact entry. Overall, the main goal of my project is to visualize and analyze how the lotus flower motif was diffused across different cultural and geographic locations, and I think I created a great project in doing so.