---
title: cooper-hewitt-alt-text
canonical_url: "https://www.modelscope.cn/datasets/biglam/cooper-hewitt-alt-text"
md_url: "https://www.modelscope.cn/datasets/biglam/cooper-hewitt-alt-text.md"
repository: biglam/cooper-hewitt-alt-text
last_updated: 2026-10-22
license: cc0-1.0
storage_size: "9.6 GB"
downloads: 465
stars: 0
---

# cooper-hewitt-alt-text

> cooper-hewitt-alt-text - biglam 在 ModelScope 开源的数据集。Cooper Hewitt — Visual Descriptions with CC0 Images

biglam/cooper-hewitt-alt-text 是 ModelScope 魔搭社区上的数据集，存储大小 9.6 GB，采用 cc0-1.0 许可。

- **Repository**: biglam/cooper-hewitt-alt-text
- **License**: cc0-1.0
- **Storage size**: 9.6 GB
- **Downloads**: 465
- **Stars**: 0
- **Last updated**: 2026-10-22

Source: https://www.modelscope.cn/datasets/biglam/cooper-hewitt-alt-text

---

# Cooper Hewitt — Visual Descriptions with CC0 Images

**49,253 museum objects**, each with a **human-written visual description** and a **CC0 image**.

Openly-licensed, human-written, *pixel-grounded* descriptions of cultural-heritage images are
close to non-existent. We swept Zenodo, the Hugging Face Hub (356 image-to-text/VQA datasets)
and GitHub looking for them and came up essentially empty — `wikimedia/wit_base` has a real
alt-text field but it is populated on only 4.8% of English rows at a **5-word median**
("Municipal office", "Flag of Aga"). This dataset exists because that gap is real.

Everything here is **CC0 end to end** — image *and* text — so derivatives can be republished.

## What a row looks like

> ![](https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=CHSDM-19039_02-000001)
>
> **Beach at Low Tide, Cullercoats, England** — Winslow Homer, 1881, charcoal on paper
>
> *"Horizontal view of a beach at low tide with small boats standing in to port and one boat
> being beached with a carriage."*

## Fields

`image` (CC0, ≤1024px) · `description` · `title` · `maker` · `date` · `medium` ·
`object_type` · `record_id` · `record_link` · `image_url` · `ids_id`

**Quality flags — we flag, we do not filter.** Slice it yourself:

| Flag | Meaning | Count |
|---|---|---|
| `n_words` / `in_target_band` | 16–30 words | 15,264 |
| `n_proper_nouns` | proxy for iconographic leakage (see below) | 18,557 rows ≥1 |
| `has_artifact` | a dropped word leaving a double space | 4,564 |
| `has_format_prefix` | the `"Horizontal rectangle."` convention | 2,973 |
| `has_crossref` | cataloguer shorthand (`"a variation of -1638"`) | 1,676 |

A reasonable default: `n_words >= 8 and not has_crossref and not has_artifact` → **40,541 rows**.
For a stricter caption seed, add `in_target_band and n_proper_nouns == 0`.

## Read this before you train on it

**These are not purpose-written alt-text.** The source field is
`extDescrAccessibility` in Smithsonian Open Access — but inspect the record and you find the
identical string in `freetext.notes` as `"Description: …"`. It is the museum's **catalogue
description note, copied into the accessibility slot**. That origin explains everything below.

**It leaks iconography.** Giani's *Venus and Cupid and Satyr* (`chndm_1901-39-3506`) is described
as *"Antiope reclines at center, apparently asleep."* **Antiope** is not derivable from pixels — a
cataloguer knows the Correggio source. Train on this and you teach a model to confidently name
figures it cannot see, which is precisely the *factual misrecognition* failure mode documented for
VLMs on heritage images. `n_proper_nouns` exists so you can avoid it: **62% of rows contain no
proper noun at all.**

**It omits.** The Winslow Homer above never mentions the large dark **foreground figure standing in
the water** — the most salient thing in the picture. A cataloguer is not writing for a screen-reader
user. Expect *selective omission* in the ground truth itself.

**It is a work in progress.** Records carry `Catalogue Status: Research in Progress` upstream.

So: a strong, large, CC0 **seed** — not gold-standard alt-text. Human rating still has real work
to do on top of it.

## Provenance

- Metadata: [Smithsonian Open Access](https://www.si.edu/openaccess), unit **CHNDM**
  (`s3://smithsonian-open-access/metadata/edan/chndm/`). CC0.
- Images: Smithsonian IDS (`ids.si.edu`), fetched at `max=1024`. Every row's first media object
  carries `usage.access == "CC0"` — that is the inclusion criterion.
- Museum: [Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum](https://collection.cooperhewitt.org).

Gotcha for anyone re-harvesting: the EDAN shards are **hex-named** (`00.txt`–`ff.txt`). Iterating
`0..99` in decimal silently fetches 100 of 256 shards, returns HTTP 200 throughout, and loses ~60%
of the corpus (19,274 rows instead of 49,253).

Please credit Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.