Our imagination has its limits, giving form only to what we can put into words. To be inspired properly again, we must explore farther afield in the visual realms of other times and places, which we can easily do on a site like Public.work.
Jason Kottke describes Public.work as an image search engine with 100,000 copyright-free images from institutions like NYPL and the Met, using AI to auto-categorize and suggest related images visually and content-wise.
These journeys on Public.work can lead from vintage magazine covers to foreign children's books, lifelike foreign landscapes to elaborate world maps, Japanese woodblock prints to roadside Americana.
On the downside, the sourcing and attribution of images on Public.work aren't great compared to platforms like Flickr Commons. According to librarian Jesósamyn West, Public.work isn't exactly a search engine but an interface for...
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