Museum Globe

동시대 유물 지구본

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Museum Globe

About Museum Globe

Museum Globe is a prototype web map that places Korean and Chinese objects of the same period side by side. It holds 892 records from four museums: 753 from the National Museum of Korea, 76 from the Palace Museum, Beijing, 37 from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and 26 from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The first 789 records form a 12th-century comparison of Goryeo celadon and Song works. A sample of 103 white and blue-and-white porcelains from the Joseon, Ming and Qing periods (14th–19th centuries) was added in October 2026.

Dates

Not every record carries an individual 12th-century date. 23 Korean records are dated to the 12th century on the museum's page; the other 710 are Goryeo celadons whose pages give no century, placed in the 12th century for comparison. The 56 Chinese records are dated by dynasty (Northern Song, Southern Song or Song) and trimmed to the 12th century, so some may fall outside it.

In the porcelain sample, 79 records carry a date from the museum's own record: a reign period such as Yongle (1403–1424) or a year range. The other 24, including all 20 from the National Museum of Korea, are dated only to the Joseon, Ming or Qing dynasty and appear across that whole span.

Sources and images

All records were collected from the official online collection pages and APIs of the four museums, and each record links back to its source page. Images are loaded directly from the museums' websites. Images from the National Museum of Korea are recorded as KOGL Type 1. Images from the Palace Museum are linked from its official website; this dataset records no licence for them. Images from the V&A are credited to the museum and shown under its terms for non-commercial use. Images from The Met are in the public domain (CC0) under its Open Access policy. Licences have not yet been checked image by image.

Records

Each object has structured fields for its name and its name in Chinese characters, date, what the date is based on, dynasty, material, category, ware (celadon, white or blue-and-white), holding museum, image licence and source. The records are a selected sample gathered by a script, not a complete count of any collection. The 103 porcelains were chosen after review from 253 candidates, about ten per museum and ware, leaving out duplicates, fragments and pieces with other decoration. Only three white pieces at the V&A from each country met the criteria. In October 2026 a check of every record removed 332 celadon fragments (shards) from the 12th-century set, along with four records whose image or source page was faulty, and restored 156 object names that had been cut short during collection.

Map positions

Places on the map are estimated locations assigned by period and culture. All Korean records are placed at the Gangjin kiln area, a major centre of Goryeo celadon production. Chinese records are placed at the Song capitals, Kaifeng (Northern Song) and Hangzhou (Southern Song), or at a general point in eastern China. Porcelain is placed at the Gwangju royal kilns (Joseon) or at Jingdezhen (Ming and Qing) as an estimate, except 38 pieces whose museum record names the kiln: 29 at Jingdezhen and 9 white wares at Dehua. Points that share a location are spread out so each can be selected; the spread has no geographic meaning. Apart from those 38, positions are not yet object-by-object findspots or kiln sites, and refining them is the next step.

Status

Built in June 2026 by Nayun Kim as a self-directed exercise in digital archiving, using AI-assisted coding. The Joseon, Ming and Qing porcelain sample, drawn from four museums, was added in October 2026. Next are Korean metalwork and painting.

Rights

© 2026 Nayun Kim. All rights reserved for the site's code, design and text; they may not be copied, modified or redistributed without permission. Collection records and images belong to the museums and are used under each museum's terms, as described under Sources and images.