Deep focus as everyone strives to be the lead mystery-solver
On 26th February 2014 Putting Art on the Map got competitive, setting a group of UCL Digital Humanities the task of solving as many mysteries as possible in an hour. The blog below is a guest post by WiIma Stefani, Historypin intern and Digital Humanities student at King’s College London who has been helping out with our Putting Art on the Map Live Events.
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We were hosted by Simon Mahony, Senior Teaching Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Centre for Digital Humanities at UCL, in the UCL computer lab. 10 students joined us and we challenged them to solve as many mysteries as possible – despite a fire drill interrupting things, in just half an hour we had 50 solved!
We had an international group and many students found paintings showing cities of their home country and were able to identify the locations. The competition got everyone motivated and there was some speedy re-pinning, with Starvi Ioannidou solving 7 mysteries and Christina solving 8. But the winner was cy3__ who solved an amazingly impressive 17!
The students showed their research skills by accurately pinning the location of the chosen painting, using Google, and in particular Google Maps; for many of the mysteries the title of the painting was the main clue, specifying the location of the scene depicted; but some of them were more tricky, such as in the case of Kephalos Bay, depicted in this painting by Herbert Hillier, and nowadays known as Kefalos Plaji, as a Greek student explained.
The same person proposed more specific dates about the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917, depicted in this artwork by William T Wood, as she had the opportunity to study this event in detail while studying at Thessaloniki’s University.
Sadly the evening had to end but many of the students continued to solve mysteries over the following days. You can do the same by visiting Putting Art on the Map, and following the project on IWM’s Twitter, Facebook and Google+ pages.
A big thank you to UCL for hosting us, and Simon and all the students for making it happen: see you on Historypin!