This is Ode To..., a weekly column where we share the stuff we're really into in hopes that you'll be really into it, too.
The Twitter bot is one of the most compelling art forms the internet has given us. Despite some of the more unsavory examples, there are plenty of artful, whimsical, and occasionally beautiful bots to lift your Twitter experience just barely above a total hellfire.
Among the best of these is @pomological, a bot that tweets vintage fruit images from the USDA National Agricultural Library's pomological watercolor collection. Every three hours, it tweets a new illustration from the 7,584-image database, along with the name of the fruit and the name of the artist who made it. (3,807 of the images are apples, but there are lots of other fruits, too.)
There are, of course, plenty of ways to "break up the feed" these days, but @pomological is one that genuinely feels both calming and educational, a crash course in both botany and art appreciation. Follow it for a while and you'll start to learn the names of some of the artists: James Marion Shull, Amanda Almira Newton, Deborah Griscom Passmore. You'll begin to notice the slight differences in their styles (Passmore's long, rectangular mats, for example), the shades of off-white paper each illustrator favors. Before you know it, you'll be a full-fledged fan, marveling at the arrival of a rare tamarind illustration on your feed.
The @pomological bot was created by Parker Higgins — @xor on Twitter — who is currently the director of special projects at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Higgins, who has a background in copyright policy, decided to start the bot because he wanted people to see and appreciate the wealth of material available in the public domain.
"Until a copyright term extension was passed by federal law in 1998, we used to get new things in the public domain every year," Higgins explained via Twitter DM. "But since 1998, so for a very large chunk of my life, we didn't get any new stuff. I always felt that led people to under-appreciate the value of the public domain."
In February 2015, Higgins decided to uncover some of what the public domain had to offer. Every day of that month, he said, he tried to find a "cool public domain collection" of material. And one day, while looking through the National Agricultural Library on the USDA website, he found the pomological watercolor collection.
There was an issue, though. The collection was only available for free in low-resolution, but to see multiple higher-quality images, you had to send in a request and pay a small fee. Higgins surmised that this wasn't a big enough revenue source to justify keeping the photos away from the public, and he was right. After making a FOIA request, he discovered the USDA had only made around $600 from the pictures in the previous four years.
So Higgins called for the photos to be released to the public, blogging about the collection and writing to the USDA with his argument. Eventually, the agency agreed to his request, and Higgins uploaded the entire collection to Wikimedia Commons. But then, the photos just kind of...sat there.
"I was really into these pictures, but I had the sense that the collection was too large to really engage with," Higgins said. "How can you think about 3,800 pictures of apples, much less the whole 7,500 pictures of fruit?"
"So I wanted to come up with a way to look at one picture at a time, and a Twitter bot seemed like the best way to do that," he added.
Thus, @pomological was born. Built using the programming language Python, it's been running continuously since 2015 and has tweeted nearly 8,000 times since then.
Still, Higgins is pretty sure it hasn't tweeted all the watercolors from the archives. "It chooses from the full pool every time, so it very, very, very likely has not tweeted the full collection," he said. "Part of that was because I didn't know what I was doing when I started, but subsequently I kind of liked the idea that it was really a truly random picture from the collection, not just a random order of looking at them."
Honestly, this is great news — the more fruit surprises in our future, the better. Just be prepared for most of them to be apples.
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