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Wednesday saw the first of our Putting Art on the Map live events. A brilliant team of students and art enthusiasts, curators and history buffs joined Historypin, Imperial War Museums’ and the research team from Edinburgh University in the Yorkshire Museum’s beautiful Hospilitum to crowdsource art from the First World War.
It was a couple of hours of intense detective work as everyone beavered away on iPads and laptops to find out more about the paintings and collaborated to piece together interesting links with other materials.
One of the teams managed to suggest an exact location for for G. S. Allfree’s A torpedoed Tramp Steamer off the Longships, Cornwall, 1918. They identified the wreck depicted as the SS Beaumaris, finding its wreck report and dating it to the 7th of February 1918. They also discovered a recent diving party went to explore the wreck and even had video footage of the dive and the wrecked vessel!
Meanwhile Donald Maxwell’s beautifully haunting St George and the Dragon: Zeppelin L15 in the Thames, April 1916 gave one group a challenge, but they were more than equal to it. Not only did they locate where the Zeppelin came down, but they also found a ton of contextualising images and data explaining the story behind this amazing painting.
We had activity going on in the Twittersphere too, with suggestions and answers being corroborated and challenged online. Take a look at this Sorify to read all that happened.
We’ll be adding all the information, data, comments and questions collected to the artworks on Putting Art on the Map where you can continue the conversation and help add more details to these fantastic artworks.
Over the next few months we’ll be running more events like these to solve some of the mysteries of the collection. Meanwhile you can take part in the Putting Art on the Map project through curating your own tours and collections of IWM’s fantastic artworks, solving mysteries online on Historypin or via IWM’s daily Tweets, Facebook and Google+ posts. Keep an eye on our blog for the latest news.
