Newly-born lamb snuggles up to a boy. 1940. Photograph by Hulton Archive. pic.twitter.com/KCNaibjS0K
— History In Pictures (@HistoryInPics) January 28, 2014
'Tseems the twittersphere is going crazy for history in pics, or rather @HistoryInPics, a thing that puts up random photos from history with a minimum of caption and attribution Started last summer by a couple of teenagers, it already has 900,000 followers. And it seems to be omnipresent whenever I direct a (brief, appalled) glance at what Twitter is doing. According to The Atlantic:
The new account has gained this massive following without the official help of Twitter, which often sticks celebrity and media accounts on its recommended-follow list, inflating their numbers. As impressively, my analysis of 100 tweets from the account this week found that, on average, a @HistoryInPics tweet gets retweeted more than 1,600 times and favorited 1,800 times.But historyblogger Wynken de Worde hates @HistoryInPics:
What they don’t post includes attribution to the photographer or to the institution hosting the digital image. There’s no way to easily learn more about the image ....She also denounces their monetizing of photographers' work and "their casual relationship to the truth."
On the upside, Wynken de Worde's post does list a slew of better curated, more thoughtful, more ethical historical image site around the web.
