- Research
- Poses
- Data
On July 17 the Pose Catalog gained a history. The new /poses/history page is a chronological timeline of erotic depiction that opens with the Venus figurines and closes on the lens era. Each era links its culture's region in the catalog and the positions its art attests.
The source registry grew from manuals to art: Old Babylonian plaques, the Turin Erotic Papyrus, Greek symposium pottery, the frescoes of Pompeii, Moche ceramics, the temple sculpture of Khajuraho and Konark, Persian and Mughal miniatures, Chinese spring-palace albums, shunga and I Modi. Positions keep their attested ancient names, such as kubda and keles from Greek comedy and mulier equitans and Venus pendula from Pompeii.
The same night an index of 87 museum-attested works across 13 traditions went live, among them Hokusai's The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814, British Museum). Fourteen works are tied to specific positions, so a pose page shows where it appears in the historical record, and region and country pages show their own place in the museum record.
Under the hood
- Sources live in one typed registry, manual or art, that grew to 22 entries, each tagged with ISO country codes, so a single record can surface on a pose page, a region page and a country page.
- Each work record carries an ID, title, tradition, date, holding institution, medium, description, a reading of its significance, an accession reference and the list of positions it depicts. The index is structured text metadata, anchored to each holding institution's accession reference.
- Every work carries a verification confidence grade, 49 high, 32 medium and 6 low, and the fact-check notes from that verification travel with each record.
- The index was extracted from a cross-cultural research dossier by a deterministic parser, then cross-checked field by field. A work links to a position when its source description names the arrangement.
- Provenance now spans 59 links across 26 poses, and the works ship in the open pose dataset as their own config.
- museum-attested works
- 87
- artistic traditions
- 13
- works tied to positions
- 14
See it on the site
Sources and open data
- EthnicErotic/pose-catalog Hugging Face
- Venus figurine Wikipedia
- Venus figurine Britannica
- Old Babylonian Empire Wikipedia
- Turin Erotic Papyrus Wikipedia
- Pottery of ancient Greece Wikipedia
- Pottery of ancient Greece Britannica
- Erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum Wikipedia
- Moche culture Wikipedia
- Moche culture Britannica
- Khajuraho Group of Monuments Wikipedia
- Konark Sun Temple Wikipedia
- Persian miniature Wikipedia
- Mughal painting Wikipedia
- Mughal painting Britannica
- Shunga Wikipedia
- Shunga Britannica
- I Modi Wikipedia
- Ancient Greek comedy Wikipedia
- Hokusai Wikipedia
- Hokusai Britannica
- The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife Wikipedia
- British Museum Wikipedia
- British Museum Britannica
- ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 Wikipedia
- Accession number (cultural property) Wikipedia
- Khajuraho Group of Monuments UNESCO World Heritage
- Sun Temple, Konârak UNESCO World Heritage
- Archaeological Areas of Pompei, Herculaneum and Torre Annunziata UNESCO World Heritage
- Hokusai, The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, 1814 (A_OA-0-109) British Museum
- The Turin Satirical-Erotic Papyrus (Cat. 2031) Museo Egizio
- ISO 3166 country codes ISO
Related build notes
- Jul 16, 2026The Erotic Pose Catalog launches with 104 keypoint-mapped positionsA named catalog of sexual positions with keypoint skeletons and historical provenance, published as the open CC BY 4.0 dataset EthnicErotic/pose-catalog.
- Jul 19, 2026Every pose gets a figure, drawn straight from its keypointsAll 104 poses render as articulated figures computed from their keypoint data, and the pose pipeline is open source with a methodology paper and a DOI.
- Aug 10, 2026Pose catalog v2.0 adds motion, context and a 194-row crosswalkFor 61 of 104 positions, no other machine-readable vocabulary holds a precise identifier. Pose catalog v2.0 is that record, now with motion and context.