The New York Public Library has 694,125 items digitized in its collection, and some of them were bound to look like emoji.
So Lauren Lampasone, a digital producer at the library, made a Twitter bot that matches the archive's old images to emojis. If you tweet an emoji to it, it'll tweet back a picture that looks like that emoji. She told Quartz that she created it to highlight the library's collection.
It works remarkably well, and the matches are clever. Send it a film camera emoji, and it'll send back an illustration with a film camera in the corner. Send it a screaming face, and it'll send back a singer belting it out.
—NYPL Emoji Bot (@NYPLEmoji) August 25, 2016
—NYPL Emoji Bot (@NYPLEmoji) August 25, 2016
It's possible to stump it. The bot doesn't know what to do with flag emojis — it just shrugs and asks you to search around in its collections yourself.
—NYPL Emoji Bot (@NYPLEmoji) August 25, 2016
All of the image-emoji matches are based on a giant database created by Lampasone and other NYPL employees. The Twitter bot's code is on Github, where people can suggest archive images for emojis that don't yet have a match.
There's only one image per emoji, unfortunately, so you'll get the same generated image every time for a specific emoji.
Still, it's fun to use. Send it your favorite emoji and see what it tweets back.
—NYPL Emoji Bot (@NYPLEmoji) August 9, 2016
