Help me make Wikipedia suck less by adding more diverse images
January 27, 2019 9:37 AM Subscribe
Please help me find archives of public domain or CC-licensed photos of notable people of color or other underrepresented groups.
In the wintertime I do a little work on Wikipedia. Part of what I like to do is either write small articles or add images to articles. Wikipedia has a representation problem and I try to work on that. I have, in the past, dug through digital archives at NYPL, Florida and Georgia looking for portraits of underrepresented folks. These archives are all either searchable by rights status or contain only public domain images so I know I can upload any images I find. I would like to find more examples like this.
A few examples that explain what I am looking for
- Library of Congress is a great resource but is not searchable by rights status. Their daguerreotypes are all "no known copyright" which is great but there are few people of color among them, however their "African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition" is also no known copyright AND has subject matter I am looking for.
- Flickr Commons is great but it's a little tricky to limit to only people who might be "notable" in Wikipedia terms. Massaging this collection of data has been my best bet.
- California and Louisiana have great archives, but no easy way to search by rights and I don't know what, if any, collections are public domain.
- Looking through pre-1923 books about notable people of color or notable events featuring people of color from the 1850s - 1920s (after photography and before copyright, example) is useful but slow.
- There are many great historical photos of Native Americans but there is scant data about their lives through the sources I have available to me. Europeana is great but not a lot of US content, though I've had some nice scores there.
Some examples of things I am talking about
- Added the secondary image to this Carrie Meek page
- Added image of Joseph Cotter to his page
- Found image of Carl Diton and wrote this page
(examples are all African Americans but I am looking for any underrepresented group which, on Wikipedia, includes women. I am mostly US-focused)
I assume there are local archives I am missing or don't know about. Do you know of one? If so, please let me know. Thank you!
In the wintertime I do a little work on Wikipedia. Part of what I like to do is either write small articles or add images to articles. Wikipedia has a representation problem and I try to work on that. I have, in the past, dug through digital archives at NYPL, Florida and Georgia looking for portraits of underrepresented folks. These archives are all either searchable by rights status or contain only public domain images so I know I can upload any images I find. I would like to find more examples like this.
A few examples that explain what I am looking for
- Library of Congress is a great resource but is not searchable by rights status. Their daguerreotypes are all "no known copyright" which is great but there are few people of color among them, however their "African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition" is also no known copyright AND has subject matter I am looking for.
- Flickr Commons is great but it's a little tricky to limit to only people who might be "notable" in Wikipedia terms. Massaging this collection of data has been my best bet.
- California and Louisiana have great archives, but no easy way to search by rights and I don't know what, if any, collections are public domain.
- Looking through pre-1923 books about notable people of color or notable events featuring people of color from the 1850s - 1920s (after photography and before copyright, example) is useful but slow.
- There are many great historical photos of Native Americans but there is scant data about their lives through the sources I have available to me. Europeana is great but not a lot of US content, though I've had some nice scores there.
Some examples of things I am talking about
- Added the secondary image to this Carrie Meek page
- Added image of Joseph Cotter to his page
- Found image of Carl Diton and wrote this page
(examples are all African Americans but I am looking for any underrepresented group which, on Wikipedia, includes women. I am mostly US-focused)
I assume there are local archives I am missing or don't know about. Do you know of one? If so, please let me know. Thank you!
The Library of Congress has the "free to use and re-use" initiative, sets page, and add-on extension.
(One entry highlights the C. M. Bell Studio Collection of 19th-century portraiture.)
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:39 PM on January 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
(One entry highlights the C. M. Bell Studio Collection of 19th-century portraiture.)
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:39 PM on January 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
This is probably implied in "pre-1923 books" but my richest source for portrait photos for Wikipedia has been pre-1923 magazines digitized by Google. I think I've only ever found non-white men, though.
I'm recalling that when Google Books first appeared it would offer thumbnails of all the non-text-only pages of each book collected together. Maybe there's some similar indexing tool out there for the IA or Hathi Trust or other collections, to speed up the search?
posted by XMLicious at 1:43 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
I'm recalling that when Google Books first appeared it would offer thumbnails of all the non-text-only pages of each book collected together. Maybe there's some similar indexing tool out there for the IA or Hathi Trust or other collections, to speed up the search?
posted by XMLicious at 1:43 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
I thought of one specific source: Baseball Digest, which escaped copyright renewal and hence is available from 1963 and earlier. But from the looks of that Commons category it may be pretty well picked over already.
Sports-related content could provide a good ROI though. And of course, magazines targeted to the black community.
posted by XMLicious at 2:01 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Sports-related content could provide a good ROI though. And of course, magazines targeted to the black community.
posted by XMLicious at 2:01 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
Oh and more generally from that page: UPenn's First copyright renewals for periodicals list.
posted by XMLicious at 2:09 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by XMLicious at 2:09 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]
A few museums have released some of their digital holdings as Open Content. For instance:
- The Getty - Open Content. Here's an example Getty Search Gateway query for "African American" that limits the results to Open Content images.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Open Access. Example query for The Met with the Open Access box checked, and selected type "Photographs" (although there are other options that are relevant).
For keeping up with new digital archives/collections, I sometimes check back on this list: UCLA Library: Creative Commons, Open Content, and Public Domain Images. And Open Culture frequently announces new free archives/collections of all types of materials, including photographs.
For LOC, I've done it a couple of different ways to look through their archives. Not as efficient as being able to search directly for freely usable images, but I'll mention them here in case it helps.
I've often found some older LOC pages that are more useful than the universal search through all their collections. For instance: LOC Prints & Photographs Reading Room, which has a list of some collections (including the 1900 Paris Exposition you referenced). Then for most (but not all), you can click on the collection name, and on the collection page in the left margin, there's a section called "This Collection" with orange arrows/bullets. One of those bullets is "Rights and Restrictions" which will have details.
Here's a couple of examples from there:
- Edward S Curtis Collection: Photographs of Native Americans. And its Rights and Restrictions page says "Images in this collection are considered to be in the public domain."
- Women Photojournalists - a different listing than most of the others - the page lists names that go on to link to their work and/or biographies about them, in some cases with pictures of them. I'm used to seeing this workflow from old LOC pages, where you have a list of photos and then have to click through to each photo to verify the rights in the "About This Item" description.
Another method that I've done is more cumbersome: the LOC Prints & Photographs Reading Room section has a standalone Rights & Restrictions page, listing a selection of collections, and each link goes, er, right to the Rights description. These are the descriptions that would be linked from the collections. The most useful common phrases I've seen in the Rights descriptions are "no restrictions", "no known restrictions", and "public domain" so I'll sometimes just search for those phrases. (Yes I wish they would just tag it with something consistent that would allow better metadata filtering.) The cumbersome aspect is that there doesn't seem to be a link *from* this particular Rights description *to* a view of the collection -- unless I'm totally missing something -- so I'll just note the collection I want and then do a search for it separately.
(And thank you for doing this, jessamyn. I sometimes like to browse through these old archives and then save images of POC / underrepresented people, but many aren't identified by name. If I come across any that could be Wikipedia "notable" I'll send them your way if you'd like, or I guess I should learn how to add the images to Wikipedia myself.)
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 9:28 PM on January 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
- The Getty - Open Content. Here's an example Getty Search Gateway query for "African American" that limits the results to Open Content images.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Open Access. Example query for The Met with the Open Access box checked, and selected type "Photographs" (although there are other options that are relevant).
For keeping up with new digital archives/collections, I sometimes check back on this list: UCLA Library: Creative Commons, Open Content, and Public Domain Images. And Open Culture frequently announces new free archives/collections of all types of materials, including photographs.
For LOC, I've done it a couple of different ways to look through their archives. Not as efficient as being able to search directly for freely usable images, but I'll mention them here in case it helps.
I've often found some older LOC pages that are more useful than the universal search through all their collections. For instance: LOC Prints & Photographs Reading Room, which has a list of some collections (including the 1900 Paris Exposition you referenced). Then for most (but not all), you can click on the collection name, and on the collection page in the left margin, there's a section called "This Collection" with orange arrows/bullets. One of those bullets is "Rights and Restrictions" which will have details.
Here's a couple of examples from there:
- Edward S Curtis Collection: Photographs of Native Americans. And its Rights and Restrictions page says "Images in this collection are considered to be in the public domain."
- Women Photojournalists - a different listing than most of the others - the page lists names that go on to link to their work and/or biographies about them, in some cases with pictures of them. I'm used to seeing this workflow from old LOC pages, where you have a list of photos and then have to click through to each photo to verify the rights in the "About This Item" description.
Another method that I've done is more cumbersome: the LOC Prints & Photographs Reading Room section has a standalone Rights & Restrictions page, listing a selection of collections, and each link goes, er, right to the Rights description. These are the descriptions that would be linked from the collections. The most useful common phrases I've seen in the Rights descriptions are "no restrictions", "no known restrictions", and "public domain" so I'll sometimes just search for those phrases. (Yes I wish they would just tag it with something consistent that would allow better metadata filtering.) The cumbersome aspect is that there doesn't seem to be a link *from* this particular Rights description *to* a view of the collection -- unless I'm totally missing something -- so I'll just note the collection I want and then do a search for it separately.
(And thank you for doing this, jessamyn. I sometimes like to browse through these old archives and then save images of POC / underrepresented people, but many aren't identified by name. If I come across any that could be Wikipedia "notable" I'll send them your way if you'd like, or I guess I should learn how to add the images to Wikipedia myself.)
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 9:28 PM on January 27, 2019 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks for your contributions everyone. I feel like I have found one of those new maxims: diverse, appropriately licensed, easy to search, pick two. Getting one level deep inside some places has been really helpful. Discourse Marker pointed to the Schlesinger Library's Flickr account which has selected images from their collection that would normally be locked up listed with "no known copyright." So, I managed to add a lot of article images, many of whom were women. Will keep picking away at this and adding some updates, thank you all for your assistance with my nerdy project.
posted by jessamyn at 7:25 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by jessamyn at 7:25 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]
Another possible source: the Cleveland Museum of Art just launched their Open Access program.
I searched for images by James Van Der Zee, a prominent African American photographer in NY in the early 20th c. He didn't always photograph famous people but maybe you could update his page with more content?
They have a great Nadar photo of Alexandre Dumas, père.
They have some Carrie Mae Weems photos.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:31 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]
I searched for images by James Van Der Zee, a prominent African American photographer in NY in the early 20th c. He didn't always photograph famous people but maybe you could update his page with more content?
They have a great Nadar photo of Alexandre Dumas, père.
They have some Carrie Mae Weems photos.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:31 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]
On the off chance you need contemporary free to use (cc: attribution) photos of Women of Color in tech...
posted by rmd1023 at 3:20 PM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by rmd1023 at 3:20 PM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
I don't know if they've already been mined for their images, but since you're looking for women too, I'll mention a couple of public domain books I ran across a while back: Helen C. Black's Notable Women Authors of the Day (though it's not US-focused) and Frances Willard & Mary Livermore's A Woman of the Century: Fourteen-Hundred Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:43 AM on January 27, 2019 [2 favorites]