Wordle, but for art history: Anthropeum tests your artifact intelligence
Anthropeum is a daily game that uses the Met’s open access data to showcase underrepresented artworks and artifacts.
By Emma Gomez edited by Claire Cameron
Small figurines of a dog and a cat from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, gift of Edward S. Harkness, 1926
Armchair art historians, rejoice: there’s a free online daily game just for you. Called Anthropoeathe game involves guessing where and when various artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York came from.
It’s deceptively simple and incredibly fun. Players view artifacts, then place a pin on a world map to guess where they came from and choose an approximate date on a timeline. For example, last Wednesday the game challenged me with an image of a bronze sculpture that looked a bit like a tank. I selected a location in the middle of modern Italy and around 500 BCE on the timeline. Lucky for me, I was right.
If you’ve ever played a similar online guessing game, such as Wordle or GeoGuessr, you probably know the exhilaration of combining your knowledge with a risky guess to achieve a resounding victory. But Anthropeum creator Matthew Chu, a 21-year-old student, says there’s more to the game than just feeling smart.
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“It’s meant to challenge us,” Chu says. “I want people to see things they don’t know about, so they can learn more.”
Chu is an accounting and data science student at the University of Washington, but in his free time he spends time with coin and artifact collectors. He has seen collectors receive unidentified artifacts salvaged from junkyards around the world, then sort them for potential museum buyers by precisely identifying where and when the artifact came from.
The challenge of trying to place mysterious objects in space and time inspired Chu to create Anthropeum. The artifacts featured in the game are taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access Initiativewhich offers images and data on more than 492,000 works of art in the Met’s collection.
A screenshot from Anthropeum.
Matthew Chu
Chu designed the game to present a balance of European and non-European artworks, in part, he says, because the Met’s collection overrepresents the former. “Otherwise, this bias would dominate the game: far more 17th-century Dutch paintings than sub-Saharan metalwork or pre-Columbian ceramics,” Chu explains on the Anthropeum website.
Using the Met’s dataset, Chu developed an algorithm to provide the game with 10 new images and artifact data per day for approximately 10 years. It also checks each entry to ensure that the regions associated with the artifacts are accurate: historical region information comes from two other open source databases called historical base maps And Open historical map.
Sometimes cultures represented by a Met artifact do not exist in the map database, and Chu must do additional research to create a custom file for their regional area when they were active. He also takes the liberty of removing artifacts so indescribable that they cannot be identified with a simple image, such as a balled polished rock.
Anthropeum doesn’t have an archive, but Chu is working on one so players can go back and attempt challenges from previous days. He also hopes to one day add artifacts from other collections outside the Met, but many of these are not openly available to independent developers.
“Many of my projects have been built around [open-source databases]”, says Chu. “By making your project open source, someone else can take inspiration from it and improve the lives of people around you.”
Many players have provided valuable feedback that improves the game, Chu adds. But there is “that 1 percent” of actors who have been frustrated by his approach to balancing the diverse origins of works of art.
“[One person said] “I think it’s so unfair that you have this artifact from this random island in the Pacific.” And it’s like, no, that’s the problem,” Chu says. “You see something that you don’t recognize, and you don’t know what it is and you’re completely wrong, but then you go there and you find out what culture created that. That’s part of the fun.
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