Welcome to the collection of musuem floor plan graphs, curated by Mitchell Eithun.
How do you make an efficient walk through a museum? These interactive graphs help explore this question. By a "graph" we mean a collection of vertices and edges, which is a popular construct in mathematics. Graphs are used to model connections between just about anything, including social networks, computers and subway stations. In this case vertices represent rooms at museums and edges represent doorways between rooms.
Interactivity: click and drag a vertex to move it. Vertices are colored using the same color in their underlying museum map. Use the drop-down box to toggle between the "Full Graph", showing the whole museum and the "Hamiltonian Path" showing an optimal path through the museum with arrows. In the "Full Graph", dashed edges are connections between the interior and exterior of the building and in the "Hamiltonian Path", dashed edges are doorways that exist but are not used in the walk.
Click here to download the paper (PDF)
Most museums have floor plans online. Some include a PDF version of printed materials at the physical museum, while some inlude an interactive version. The table shows avaliable online for floor plans several museums in London. The rank is among all UK museums and art galleries, based on 2017 visitor statistics from the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions.
| Musuem | Web Map? | PDF Map? | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| The British Musuem | Yes | 1 | |
| Tate Modern | Yes | 2 | |
| The National Gallery | Yes1 | Yes | 3 |
| National History Musuem | Yes | Yes | 4 |
| Victoria & Albert Museum | Yes1 | Yes | 5 |
| Science Museum | Yes | 6 | |
| Tate Britain | Yes | 9 | |
| The National Portrait Gallery | Yes1 | Yes | 13 |
| Museum of London | Yes | Yes | 18 |
| London Transport Musuem | Yes | 39 |
1 These museums have an interactive floor plan online.
(c) 2018 Mitchell Eithun