In every great city, the streets don’t just carry people, they carry stories. Melbourne, known for its laneways, coffee culture, and cosmopolitan flair, is also home to a lesser-celebrated narrator: its public art. Scattered across gardens, sidewalks, and boulevards, these works - from solemn war memorials to abstract installations - form a chronological trail of the city’s evolving values and collective identity. This project sought to unravel that timeline, using data analysis, natural language processing, and geospatial visualisation to trace how Melbourne’s outdoor artworks have mirrored, challenged, and documented society over time.
Our exploration began with the City of Melbourne’s “Outdoor Artworks” dataset, accessible via their open data portal (City of Melbourne Open Data Team 2017). This dataset encompasses over 200 entries of outdoor artworks, including memorials and sculptures, detailing attributes such as titles, descriptions, installation dates, classifications, and geographic coordinates. It serves as a comprehensive resource for understanding the spatial and temporal distribution of public art across Melbourne’s streets, laneways, parks, and waterfronts.
While the dataset provided essential metadata, many descriptions were terse and inconsistent, containing more metadata than thematic context. To enrich the dataset, this project employed Google’s Gemini model, a large language model (LLM), to extract thematic “tags” from the existing descriptions. This approach—known as LLM-assisted classification—has been gaining strong traction in digital humanities and cultural analytics, where traditional metadata often lacks interpretive depth (Khan et al. 2024). These tags, such as war memorial, colonial history, or conceptual art, serve as the linguistic palette through which we can trace Melbourne’s artistic and cultural evolution.
To guide the Gemini model in extracting relevant tags, the following prompt was used:
Convert this artwork description into a list of tags.""Possible tags to choose from: [ “war memorial”, “colonial history”, “gold rush”, “mythology”, “aboriginal culture”, “street life”, “transport”, “immigration”, “diversity”, “pets”, “nature”, “activism”, “geometry”, “light & motion”, “conceptual art”, “interactive”, “kinetic structures” “technology”,]
This approach allowed for systematic annotation of each artwork with thematic tags, facilitating a more nuanced analysis of trends over time.
The date field was additionally processed, normalising non-standardised entries like “c1936” into clean integers and aggregating artworks by decade to observe longer-term patterns.
This plot revealed a significant concentration of installations around the 1930s, when public memory, especially around war and colonial milestones, was perhaps most active. Interestingly, the 1950s–70s showed a slowdown in installations, before a modern revival took hold in the 1990s and 2000s, likely reflecting Melbourne’s rebranding as a cultural capital and a global city.
Memorials dominated the early years, consistent with a focus on colonial achievements and remembrance. In contrast, later decades saw a diversification in classifications and media.
With tags in place, we can construct a matrix of tag frequency by decade to visualise what thematic concerns dominated each era.
Certain patterns immediately stood out: - Colonial history and war memorials dominated the early 20th century. - Nature appeared consistently, but peaked in the 1970s and 2000s, echoing growing environmental consciousness. - Diversity, conceptual art, and street life emerged strongly in the 1990s, indicating an era of postmodern expression and identity politics.
This visualisation offered a clear lens into Melbourne’s shifting priorities. Public art, far from static, was responsive to the political, cultural, and aesthetic climate of its time.