Object Stories

Want a new perspective on an object? This is a project that transforms facts about objects into narrative versions of the art pages on the museum’s website. When you hit a different route, you can swap story templates of and see different narrative or creative versions of the object page.

Currently, the website has two versions of stories. The first version renders the object through the two basic Mad Libs templates, depending on their object type (coins or non-coins).

• An example of a coin
• An example of a sculpture
• An example of a painting

To check out any objects from the collection, follow the URL template: /object/OBJECTID

The second version consists of creative narrative fragments. One fragment is about detecting the eye gaze direction of the figure in a portrait and displaying short poetic lines describing them. The other fragment is a first-person narrative of an object's history of displacement.

• An example of a portrait that looks to the right
• An example of a portrait that looks to the left
• An example of a portrait that looks to the front


• An example of an object with a history of displacement

To swap to this version of object stories, just add /coolpage to the end of your URL above, namely in the format: /object/OBJECTID/coolpage

Object Stories is a research project from the Department of Digital Infrastructure and Emerging Technology at Harvard Art Museums. This initial version was built during a three week sprint in January 2024.