Show HN: Ex Situ – Open-source spatial index of displaced cultural artifacts

7/21/2026 at 6:12:11 AM

Huh! Was hoping to get, for example, a sense of scale of cultural artifacts stolen from Korea by the Japanese. But I don't see any provenance descriptions for Japanese institutions. Either way, this is super cool. Thank you for sharing this.

by theroadnotbacon

7/21/2026 at 7:37:14 AM

Fair catch, it only pulls from institutions with open access APIs (Met, V&A, SMB Berlin, AIC). Not aware of an equivalent from Japanese museums, if you know one, happy to add it.

by hbyel

7/21/2026 at 8:33:10 AM

In that case, the map looks misleading, doesn’t it? It looks as though London and Berlin, for example, stand out as having dislocated disproportionately many artifacts from around the world. And on the other hand, Paris looks innocent. But in truth, London and Berlin are just being honest about it giving you open access to the data whereas Paris doesn’t. So perhaps it would be better to mark cities that do provide data with, say, a green dot. This also helps the visual understanding of the direction of the transfer. And it would make it clear at a glance that Paris is not innocent, but that Paris is simply lacking data.

by leobg

7/21/2026 at 8:49:44 AM

Fair point, and a good idea. A visual marker distinguishing "has open data" from "doesn't" would meaningfully reduce that distortion. Adding it to the list.

by hbyel

7/21/2026 at 3:07:45 PM

I was slightly discombobulated by the first London link I clicked actually showing a number of artifacts from London that are currently held in Berlin.

by andrewaylett

7/21/2026 at 10:29:01 AM

> London and Berlin are just being honest about it giving you open access to the data

A small subset of the data. If all London museums were included (such as the British Museum, for example) there would be a LOT more lines going to London.

by NoboruWataya

7/21/2026 at 6:55:20 AM

I think much more lines should go to Moscow. At least from such places as Crimea. But I see you covered only western/euro-american institutions.

by txzl

7/21/2026 at 7:34:03 AM

Correct, scoped to western/euro-american museums as noted in the post, it’s just where I started. Open to expanding if there’s good open data to pull from.

by hbyel

7/21/2026 at 6:39:43 PM

Russia still has a huge portion of the Nazi stolen artifacts but I have no idea how many are in public museums.

by _--__--__

7/21/2026 at 5:51:29 PM

This is a really cool project. Is there any way to contribute data?

Hawaii's artifacts have been displaced far and wide, The British museum alone has a stunning collection that usually sits in a basement, e.g. a small sample of their collection documented here:

https://www.artoftheancestors.com/blog/hawaii-british-museum

by taylorfinley

7/21/2026 at 6:23:24 AM

One day I really should dig up my great great great great grandfather’s[^1] diaries to see first hand how he justified bringing back so much stuff to the UK.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Richard_Hamilton

by iamacyborg

7/21/2026 at 7:02:33 AM

“To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.”

by fkdk

7/21/2026 at 10:21:59 AM

Crap quotes like this is what people use to justify slavery, fascism, genocide, apartheid.

by mad_tortoise

7/21/2026 at 1:25:09 PM

Does the world really need to be reduced to binary state, people being black or white and nothing else? I know its supremely convenient mentally, this is how populists ride their huge waves and its each of us in the crowd that allow that.

I find it much more compelling to fully see some negative aspect(s) of someone's past existence while accepting that if I grew up in that era, I would have vastly different morals and probably be fine with that.

Judge others not too harshly if you may, since you will also be judged further down the line and most surely will be judged as inadequately moral or good by their standards, didn't do enough to help preventing some proper shit happening/will happen and so on, rather looked away while milking some comfy job for those sweet dollars (we all have kids and families and mortgages and dreams I know, so does everybody else).

Most people here work for FAANGs of this era for example, hardly moral corporations by any metric and some literally sowing evil ie in cancers called social networks and their gamifications or pushing unwanted ads / outright lies into every eyeball they can reach. And those companies are hardly the only black spots on current society, I'd even say purely moral work is rather rare.

by kakacik

7/21/2026 at 1:45:36 PM

I judge people exactly how my moral's and principles determine they should be judged. People love to use "of the time" type quotes to excuse slavery for example, when in actual fact it was well known at the time to be despicable.

Or perhaps a better example is "of the time" quotes to justify apartheid South Africa, a place my parents grew up in. Many friends parent's were blindly ignorant or supportive, but that doesn't mean they didn't know the facts. They just go, "that's how it was". When I know from my parent's it wasn't like that, and White and Black people knew exactly what was going on. Same could be said for Nazi Germany.

And certainly same can be said for everyone on here that works at FAANG, or Palantir or any US defense contractor. They are knowingly and willingly aiding genocide or mass surveillance. They cannot claim ignorance.

We live in a day and age where people far too easily give up their freedoms, give up moral stand points because it is difficult or divisive. Yes, that's exactly what it is meant to be.

Maybe if we judged people more harshly we wouldn't be seeing a rise in fascism today, because views are just accepted as they are. Hell no. I hope I am judged down the line. Don't be too blase about accepting shitty viewpoints because people are morally ignorant, or lack principles and in doing so divide humanity along spurious lines.

by mad_tortoise

7/21/2026 at 3:54:15 PM

You might want to read Hamilton’s defence of Elgin to understand how they saw the difference between legitimate and illegitimate acquisition of antiquities.

by iamacyborg

7/21/2026 at 5:40:26 PM

Who say's I haven't read it? Yet, Elgin still stole the marbles. Justified it by claiming the barbarism of the Ottoman's was to blame and he was only doing good, despite this being disputed. And hilarious as his removal caused permanent and untold damage to the marbles. And the British refuse to return them even though they would be safe today.

Furthermore theft of antiquities isn't quite the same as slavery, genocide, apartheid... Although culturally relevant, it does form part of ethnic cleansing - which the British Empire excelled at.

by mad_tortoise

7/21/2026 at 8:28:12 AM

You know that they exist, you know where they are, and you’ve never read or digitized them? Or was that sarcasm?

by leobg

7/21/2026 at 9:05:50 AM

They’re at my aunts house, I’ve just not had a chance to read them or ask my cousin to digitise them and send them to me.

by iamacyborg

7/21/2026 at 12:19:13 PM

Looks like you've got some real history there. Think about it. You might even be able to hack together an Ask My Ancestor chatbot. Heck, I’d build it for you. The scamming and the OCR are going to be the hardest parts I imagine.

by leobg

7/21/2026 at 12:47:33 PM

I’m quite fortunate on the family history side of things. Not sure a chatbot is what’s needed but I’d be happy to make digitised files public that relate to things that are in the public interest. This ancestor for example was key in the acquisition of the rosetta stone and the parthenon marbles and was the recipient of one of Canova’s “Ideal Heads” that can now be seen at the Ashmolean in Cambridge. There’s a lot of history associated with those 3 events.

by iamacyborg

7/21/2026 at 8:19:23 AM

> Coming from a design background

From a UX perspective, it is very weird to place the toggle button for the right panel at the top of the left panel... After I gave up to find a way to close the right panel, I found that button a few minutes later, when I looked around for other interactive elements.

by arendtio

7/21/2026 at 8:47:24 AM

thanks, agreed, will fix :)

by hbyel

7/21/2026 at 6:22:16 PM

This project is so cool! Hats off to ya for such a unique idea.

by hexorcist404

7/21/2026 at 2:25:06 PM

The README says arc aggregation runs in a web worker. At 200k artifacts, what actually chokes first when everything is visible at low zoom?

by satoyoshidev

7/21/2026 at 7:41:24 AM

This is fantastic visualization!

I couldn't figure out from the UI but is there a way to filter the map? Say, I only want to see things going out of Cusco or I only want to see where things end up in Berlin?

It would also be nice to have some directionality to the lines to indicate source and destination, perhaps a colour or lightness gradient or something.

by potamic

7/21/2026 at 7:53:15 AM

Thanks! You actually can filter by source already, search lets you filter arcs by place/site. Destination filtering technically works too, via Collections, but that only makes sense while there are a handful, once it’s hundreds it’ll need its own proper destination filter. Good call on the color/gradient distinction for source vs. destination on the arcs too, that’s worth trying.

by hbyel

7/21/2026 at 8:30:16 AM

One thing I'd find interesting is the inverse view: instead of starting from a place or artifact, start from a museum and visualize the geographic footprint of its collection. It could make the collection's provenance surprisingly tangible, especially for institutions with very global holdings.

by ahk-dev

7/21/2026 at 12:17:02 PM

Is there any way to filter the lines? There are so many lines it's hard to see what's going on. But definitely interesting.

by FelixKunzJr

7/21/2026 at 12:40:20 PM

Thanks, you can filter by source in the search panel already.

by hbyel

7/21/2026 at 9:49:46 AM

How well does the fuzzy matcher resolve provenance text to origin sites? Curious what share of the 200k in the README needed hand correction.

by vanyaland

7/21/2026 at 10:37:11 AM

[flagged]

by hbyel

7/21/2026 at 5:37:33 PM

Wow so smooth! Great project!!!

by thenthenthen

7/21/2026 at 2:16:16 PM

What counts as displaced ?

by poulpy123

7/21/2026 at 8:17:25 AM

Do you plan on improving the performance of the website ?

by bazzingadev

7/21/2026 at 8:45:33 AM

[flagged]

by hbyel

7/21/2026 at 7:00:38 AM

holy gosh, this is brilliant. i've been toggling around this site for a good 40 minutes now. learning so much!!! arrrgggh, i love the internet.

by warpspeedchic

7/21/2026 at 7:46:42 AM

It is truly very useful not only for art history but also for the history of colonial rule

by berardino

7/21/2026 at 7:06:27 AM

Very cool

by robintiman11

7/21/2026 at 1:47:06 PM

now make a database of cultural artifacts destroyed by origin countries

by throwaway69123

7/21/2026 at 9:19:02 AM

[dead]

by terekhindc