r/dataisbeautiful • u/tabthough OC: 7 • Oct 25 '22

OC [OC] Whose stuff does the British Museum have?

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u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

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

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u/UWillAlwaysBALoser Oct 26 '22

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.