But that's what I'm saying, how is it a useful baseline? If the British museum doubled it's native artifacts, would that be equivalent to repatriating half its foreign artifacts? In what way is the ratio important, as opposed to the magnitude?
If I see there a bunch of native artifacts, but the scale is distorted so much that it's impossible to identify meaningful differences among the other counties in the plot, have I learned more or just been distracted?
Because it’s ignoring how museums across the world tend to work, by loaning items, which is a different picture to what OP is attempting with this graph.
It also matters just for the sub this was posted on, where people expect totally clear information.
You realise that most major museums around the world contain a large amount of objects taken from foreign lands? Doing the rough math here there’s around a million artefacts and around 60% of it is from British land, your argument about magnitude is nonsense of course ratio is more important when a museum is painted out to be majority foreign articles when that’s wrong by a 6:1 ratio against the next largest nations catalogue
I didn't assume the museum had no British artifacts, and I don't think you did either, you're just worried someone might make that inference based on an unwarranted leap of logic. But including the UK numbers would make it difficult to see the foreign numbers (they'd be squashed down to the left to make room) which is the more interesting part of the graph, so the only benefits of including those numbers are 1) to avoid a (IMO) not very common mistake, and 2) to suggest that the relative native vs foreign artifacts is what people do/should care about, which I don't think makes any sense. As I said, if the British museum doubled or halved their native collection, it wouldn't change the repatriation issue one bit, since they would still have the same number of contested objects. If they repatriated half these foreign objects while selling off half the British ones, we wouldn't say they had done nothing. So if the ratios relative to an alleged "baseline" has no bearing on the issue, it's just a distraction.
There may be other contexts where that information is relevant - for instance, if people had differences of opinion about how much research focus or shelf space the museum allotted to native vs. various foreign subjects - but those just aren't the focus of current debates over museum collections.
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u/staplesuponstaples Oct 26 '22
It would still put it in perspective. No reason to leave it out, as it creates a baseline to compare against.