Harvard Art Museum Bot
- 1 minI was browsing Programmable Web’s API Directory, when I came across the Harvard Art Museum API. Having just set up my @p0em_bot, I immediately recognized that I could use this resource to construct another fun art bot, so I went straight to work.
Carp Climbing a Waterfall
— Art Museum Bot (@art_museum_bot) July 25, 2018
Totoya Hokkei
Prints
Japanese, Edo period, circa early 19th century pic.twitter.com/dlUshWAflg
The source code for the bot is available here. It was pretty easy to build – I would say the hardest part was carefully selecting which fields in the object records should be used to generate the tweeted description, and then designing a method that would generate an informative description for any object regardless of blank fields.
This is a page from what is known as the Housley Sketchbook, containing sketches of landscapes. The sketchbook has now been dismantled and the pages dispersed.
— Art Museum Bot (@art_museum_bot) July 25, 2018
Martin Johnson Heade
Drawings
American, 1860 pic.twitter.com/8QLtNJBL4N
Funnily enough, in my eagerness to complete this project, I never stopped to check if it had been done before. Thankfully, it looks like no one has ever made a Twitter bot using the Harvard Art Museum API, so my code is bringing objects and artifacts to from their archives to Twitter for the first time.
'Guang' Covered Ritual Wine Vessel with Animal, Bird, and 'Taotie' Decor
— Art Museum Bot (@art_museum_bot) July 24, 2018
Vessels
Chinese, early Western Zhou period, mid 11th-early 10th century BCE pic.twitter.com/PArVlAxFys
However, it turns out that a lot of museums have APIs and/or open data initiatives, and lots of other developers have independently had the same idea as me! There are numerous active Twitter bots that also tweet out objects from museum archives, including @PhilaMuseumBot, @LACMAbot, @WaltersArtBot, and @guggenheimbot.
Wonderful news for my fellow art-lovers on Twitter!
Cristyn Howard
Software Developer. Dynamically-typed.