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Views of the ‘Tesseract’ from Charles Howard Hinton’s “The Fourth Dimension”, 1904 (link)

The Public Domain Review, an Interview With

Editor Adam Green
Jason Forrest
Feb 3, 2020 · 9 min read

The internet is a complex place. On one hand, you have trolls, dark patterns, and
deception. On the other, you have wonderfully altruistic platforms of knowledge open to
the public to teach and inspire. Enter, The Public Domain Review.
As a quick refresher, the Standford University Library explains, “the term “public domain”
refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as
copyright, trademark, or patent laws. The public owns these works, not an individual
author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but
no one can ever own it.”

The Public Domain Review is a curio cabinet of wondrously strange artifacts of knowledge,
or as they put it, an exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art,
literature, and ideas. Founded in 2011, it’s been lauded by the mainstream press for its
ingenious discoveries and insights. The site has been lauded by the Guardian as “ … A
model of digital curation” and The Paris Review brags that it is “One of our favourite
journals.”

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Adam Green, the editor-in-chief of The Public
Domain review, to discuss their work and various ways they have organized visual
information and knowledge.

Three pages from A Cosmography Manuscript, 12th Century (link)

Jason Forrest: Thanks for joining us, why don’t you introduce yourself.

Adam Green: Thanks for having me! I’m Adam Green, based in London, and I started
The Public Domain Review nine years ago now. It started off quite slowly as a little blog.
I used to make collages and used a lot of these online archives to source images and
texts — like Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr Commons. I began
gathering some of my favorite images I’d find on my internet travels and I was
fortunate enough to have a friend working for the Open Knowledge Foundation. They
were putting in a funding bid to a U. S. organization (The Shuttleworth Foundation),
to do something around promoting the value of the public domain. And we had the
idea to develop the blog into a fully-fledged website, with essays, and so The Public
Domain Review was born. Then, well, it has gradually just taken over my life.

George Mayerle’s Eye Test Chart, ca. 1907 (link)

JF: I know the feeling. So what would you say is the mission of The Public Domain
Review?

AG: I guess there are a few different strands to the mission. One of the main things is to
celebrate the richness of the public domain, the cultural public domain. In particular,
the institutions which are allowing access to those public domain artworks and books
without restriction, so that public domain works stay in the public domain when they
go online. So in one sense, it’s a celebration of the work of those good institutions, and
a portal through which to explore them, but then in another way , its simply just a fun
place to showcase, and explore, the unusual treasures that history has to offer. I guess
to take a little sideways look at the history of art, literature, and ideas. So, you know,
we won’t necessarily feature very well-known stuff, but more kind of overlooked
histories or if we do focus on notable people or works it’ll be from more of an unusual
angle. And, of course, it’s also a platform for writers to get the word out about the
really fascinating stuff they’re researching and writing about.

Contents of an Ostrich’s Stomach, ca. 1930 (link)

JF: Do you think writers come to you with things they just stumbled across on their
own or do you think that they are actually out there combing through archives
looking for as you said, these sideways looks into history?

AG: I say that it’s the former. Often academics coming to us with “offshoots” of content
which can’t find a place within their Ph.D. or book. Or sometimes authors who create
adaptations from their book chapters and things like that. But we don’t get many
people saying “hey, look at this incredible stuff” just out of the blue, separate from a
line of research they are already involved in.
 3 pages from an Illustrated Catalogue of Period Ornaments, ca. 1919 (link)

JF: The Public Domain Review has so much information about such wildly different
sources, how have you tried to present this to your readers?

AG: Yes it is a motley mix of content for sure! We’re actually in the process of improving
the way we present this variety. We’ve recently got a new website built which we hope
has improved things, how people can sift through the ever-growing mass of stuff. One
important thing is to try and be as clear as possible about where content comes from by
always linking back to the source and if we found it via someone else. Then we include
indications about the usage of the possible rights, so we’ve got metadata that
accompanies all the collections pieces. Then we try and tag sensibly to make things
discoverable according to category.

With this new website, it’s exciting, currently working on developing new ways of
displaying the data according to things like timelines, maps, and indexes to help create
new ways of linking material.
 Two cartoon maps of Europe in 1870 & 1914 (link)

JF: I didn’t realize that you were trying to find ways of visualizing your archive.

AG: Yeah, that’s something quite new. I mean beyond the “tag cloud”. We want to find
ways of being a bit more clever with ways of displaying the data. The timeline, in
particular, is something I think could be really interesting in terms of throwing up
connections and unexpected synchronicities.
 Alexander Graham Bell’s Tetrahedral Kites, 1903–9 (link)

JF: Why would you be looking for synchronicities and overlaps?

AG: There’s always something nice about relating potentially quite different material
together. It’s not just like: “look at this thing,” — in a vacuum — but rather about
seeing it in context, or perhaps, even better, illuminating unexpected contexts, creating
a way of displaying networks and relationships from which new angles of approach can
emerge.

JF: Right, it’s a way of recontextualizing information or history which is something

that I’ve personally very preoccupied with as well. So the site obviously features a
ton of photographs, illustrations, diagrams, and charts. Do you find that certain
types of illustrations or visualizations resonate more or less with your audience?
 Johann Heinrich Lambert’s three-dimensional adaptation of Tobias Mayer’s triangle, featured in his
Beschreibung einer mit dem Calauschen Wachse ausgemalten Farbenpyramide, 1772 (link)

AG: It’s hard to say. There’s such a broad spectrum of interest from the readers. But I
guess diagrams from the 19th century always seem to do well, there’s such wonderful
stuff — just when the publishing industry was starting to bloom — a total revolution in
people digesting info to get down onto paper.
JF: Obviously with the innovations in publishing and printing in the 18th and 19th
century it sets the stage for publishing to really scale, right? But then when you hit
the 20th century, it’s like truly the floodgates are really open. I mean, it’s
impossible to parse through it all, but post-1900, you’re just you’re gonna find a lot
of content about pretty much any given subject in print form. I think it’s just really
fascinating to see the scale of human documentation continue to ramp up.

Skating with Bror Myer, 1921 (link)

JF: So with all that you’ve invariably learned in publishing all this content. What
does information design mean to you now?

AG: I guess I see it through a quite particular lens, a historical lens. But I’m not sure I
see it in relation to any overarching meaning as such — more just specific examples of
how people over time have organised and represented various kinds of data.. The
uniqueness of all these different approaches.
LEFT & CENTER: Two plates from James Sowerby’s A New Elucidation of Colours, 1809 RIGHT: Philipp Otto
Runge’s Farbenkugel 1810. (link)

JF: You’ve been doing it for nine years, do you find that you’re able to view a lot of
the content that people bring to you with additional insight because you’ve been
looking at these particular moments in history and different disciplines for so long?

AG: For sure. You know, there’s a lot of synergy going on. A lot of the material tends to
feedback into each other when I’m looking for a picture to illustrate some particular
point or paragraph in an essay.
“The Temple of Time” (1846) by Emma Willard — Source (Cartography Associates: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). Article here

JF: Do you have any particular favorites that are focusing on data visualization or
information design that you’ve covered?

AG: Our latest essay on Emma Willard, written by Susan Schultern, is great. Willard is
such a fascinating figure and her “maps of time” just incredible — the imagination to
represent the flow of time in such a way, I guess fairly familiar to us now, but totally
new at the time. On the visualization of time/history angle, there’s also the whole steps
of life phenomena which is really interesting — I suppose a kind of proto-meme which
would see a stage of a person’s life get mapped out in a series of steps going up to the
height of middle-aged and then slowly declining to death.
 “Slaves and Free Negroes,” W.E.B. Du Bois, 1900 (link)

The W.E.B. Du Bois visualizations of African-American life, which I know you’ve

featured before, are amazing, and that was actually one of our most popular posts
we’ve ever had. And then, of course, there’s a whole bunch of stuff relating to
representing the cosmos.
 Cellarius’s celestial atlas is great, and there’s also a really brilliant set of cosmographic
diagrams and schemas found in this late 12th-century manuscript from England,
including a lovely “graph” plotting the course of the planets.

I’m also a big fan of Robert Fludd, he has some beautiful visualizations of his occult
ideas — and I don’t know if this would count — he also made these really good
diagrams relating to memory tricks, where he’s taken objects in everyday life that look
like numbers or letters, to be used in a “memory palace.”

Robert Fludd’s Memory Tricks, 1617. The idea was that a string of letters or numbers could be recalled by the
picturing of a scene involving objects. So the date 1066 could become a speared donkey lagging behind two snails
(link)

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