Open-Source Tool Maps 100K+ Displaced Museum Artifacts Back to Their Origins

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A designer and developer has built Ex Situ, an open-source spatial index that maps over 100,000 museum artifacts held in Western institutions back to their geographic origins using interactive arcs. The project, which began as an MA thesis in 2022, currently indexes collections from institutions including the Met, V&A, and SMB Berlin, covering categories such as Islamic, Asian, African, and ethnological art. Built with Next.js, Deck.gl, and a Strapi backend, it pulls data from museum open-access APIs and is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Rather than duplicating institutional data, the tool links origin sites to destination collections, routing researchers directly to source institutions. The solo developer is now seeking community contributions to help with performance scaling, data pipelines, and missing museum API integrations.

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