The mother of all public domain art search engines
August 5, 2024 8:28 AM Subscribe
Public Work is a search engine for public domain content. Explore 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources.
Searching for "porn" just gets you a blank page
first of all :-) that was certainly not my first thought. try 'sex' (a google n-gram shows 'porn' as a word really begins to take off around 1970)
interface that is, it seems, trying to redirect you to https://cosmos.so which has a bunch of nice words...that there's an AI machine at the back of it
"Cosmos uses AI to automatically tag every element,"
posted by HearHere at 10:20 AM on August 5 [1 favorite]
first of all :-) that was certainly not my first thought. try 'sex' (a google n-gram shows 'porn' as a word really begins to take off around 1970)
interface that is, it seems, trying to redirect you to https://cosmos.so which has a bunch of nice words...that there's an AI machine at the back of it
"Cosmos uses AI to automatically tag every element,"
posted by HearHere at 10:20 AM on August 5 [1 favorite]
They need to do some de-duping on the images. The infinite scroll seems to just keep repeating the same set of results in different order, which seems like a really dark pattern to make it seem like the database is larger than it is. Plus once you click on an image, it replaces the search results with related to that image, which makes navigation really frustrating.
As far as attribution, some of the images I clicked on had a "source" link, which went to deep link direct to an image on images.metmuseum.org or the-public-domain-review.imgix.net. So there isn't any context around the source, although the image grid has a small (i) that brings up a short title and date. Unfortunately the website hijacks the drag motion, so you can't copy-n-paste that to search for that text to try to track down the image elsewhere.
Neat results, although I'm not a fan of the interface.
posted by autopilot at 10:24 AM on August 5 [2 favorites]
As far as attribution, some of the images I clicked on had a "source" link, which went to deep link direct to an image on images.metmuseum.org or the-public-domain-review.imgix.net. So there isn't any context around the source, although the image grid has a small (i) that brings up a short title and date. Unfortunately the website hijacks the drag motion, so you can't copy-n-paste that to search for that text to try to track down the image elsewhere.
Neat results, although I'm not a fan of the interface.
posted by autopilot at 10:24 AM on August 5 [2 favorites]
(oh and the dates are definitely not authoritative. one of the images I looked at shows "2016" as the date, which I think is when the collection from New York Public Library was released)
posted by autopilot at 10:25 AM on August 5
posted by autopilot at 10:25 AM on August 5
Searching for "porn" just gets you a blank page and there's only one way that happens either.
Following up on this, I ran a few searches using older, porn-adjacent words, e.g., pornography, fellatio, gamahuche. You get some interesting interpretations. "Erotica" gave me this image, which may do something for some, but I can't say it blew up my skirt.
Looking forward to exploring. Thanks for the posting.
posted by the sobsister at 11:40 AM on August 5
Following up on this, I ran a few searches using older, porn-adjacent words, e.g., pornography, fellatio, gamahuche. You get some interesting interpretations. "Erotica" gave me this image, which may do something for some, but I can't say it blew up my skirt.
Looking forward to exploring. Thanks for the posting.
posted by the sobsister at 11:40 AM on August 5
Pornography was definitely a word that has a longer history and trying that also gets you a blank page. Sex gets you an image like this one which is from a medieval fencing book but which does include a man and a woman... grappling. I think public.work is just a discovery layer for the actual content which is on Cosmos. And yes, you can see a lot of 2016 images which dates back to this specific NYPL announcement.
And then I got all worked up about this so I wrote up a longer blog post. This is a cool thought-provoking thing and thank you for sharing it.
posted by jessamyn at 11:44 AM on August 5 [5 favorites]
And then I got all worked up about this so I wrote up a longer blog post. This is a cool thought-provoking thing and thank you for sharing it.
posted by jessamyn at 11:44 AM on August 5 [5 favorites]
Wow, I never realized how bad a gallery-type interface could be.
It would have never occurred to me to have a search result page not start me at the top of the results.
But I guess experimentation is important in design.
posted by Senescence at 1:33 PM on August 5
It would have never occurred to me to have a search result page not start me at the top of the results.
But I guess experimentation is important in design.
posted by Senescence at 1:33 PM on August 5
When they say 'browse' they mean 'BROWSE'...
I feel like the 'results' are just floating by, and that there are really only 25 or so images returned.
I don't know how to focus the searches which bugs me to no end.
I just don't see how I could really use this to find images for my use.
And by the way, I used "book covers" as a search to see the results...
they did return various book covers,
book illustrations,
and
also many images of sheet music for minstrel shows complete with singers in blackface.
bleh!
posted by calgirl at 4:20 PM on August 5
I feel like the 'results' are just floating by, and that there are really only 25 or so images returned.
I don't know how to focus the searches which bugs me to no end.
I just don't see how I could really use this to find images for my use.
And by the way, I used "book covers" as a search to see the results...
they did return various book covers,
book illustrations,
and
also many images of sheet music for minstrel shows complete with singers in blackface.
bleh!
posted by calgirl at 4:20 PM on August 5
« Older Here's what happens when you give people free... | Comes up with the craziest, wackiest but best... Newer »
And yet! The librarian in me says "How do we know these are public domain works unless we know where they came from?" I had to do a reverse image search to track down one of these images which I found thanks to our own peacay and his BibliOdyssey site and a post from 2012. And sure it was public domain but as someone who works for Flickr Commons helping cultural heritage organizations share more of their unique content, this is the thing they are often worried about. That people will take their stuff, without any attribution (yes I know CC licenses can help with that) and remove it entirely from its context, its metadata.
Like I'm not even sure how some of my queries are even finding some of these images. And it would be nice to know. Though I can tell a little bit that there's an AI machine at the back of it because search for "fuck" finds old issues of Puck and there's only one way that happens. Searching for "porn" just gets you a blank page and there's only one way that happens either.
So, I think this sort of thing is the future, certainly. I just wish there was a minor way to tweak it so that people could be pointed in the direction of where this stuff was shared in the first place. I'm familiar enough with this space--the public domain display space--that I know what a marvel this is in terms of being engaging and fun and fresh, but also understanding what other information about these images is available, information which is being held back.
posted by jessamyn at 9:18 AM on August 5 [18 favorites]