Antonia Mercé, the power of geospatial visualization

Last year (2023), I had the privilege of collaborating on an extraordinary project with the Juan March Foundation, which was officially launched this January. This initiative aimed to revive the artistic legacy of the dancer Antonia Mercé, who left an indelible mark on Spanish dance.

My contribution focused on developing an interactive map that showcased her performances at the world’s most renowned theaters during her global tours (at a time when international travel primarily occurred by sea). To achieve this, I utilized the Evolutive Map format, a visualization technique that incorporates both geographical (based on coordinates) and historical (based on dates) layers of information. This created a powerful tool allowing viewers to witness the locational transformations over time. For instance, in the case of Antonia Mercé, we identified over 200 geographical-historical landmarks to illustrate the 7 stages of her life as she journeyed through Europe, America, and Asia.

For this endeavor, I employed the R EvolMap (Evolutive Maps) library, also utilized by the Reina Sofía Museum and developed by the University of Salamanca. This package offers numerous advantages, enabling the overlay of various HTML and CSS elements onto the map to visualize additional information. Thus, we were able to incorporate photographs at each marked landmark, theater descriptions, eras, and even link an entire webpage within the map to connect to the artist’s documentary archive, also published by the Juan March Foundation.

Notably, this project integrated several AI tools. For instance, we used artificial intelligence to process images, extracting them from original albums and completing those with missing fragments. Additionally, we extracted texts from newspapers of the era in various languages using OCR, which facilitated the digitization of historical documents.

Let’s explore it: