Art Detective is part of the PCF Your Paintings range of applications, together with the Qi Content Management System, Your Paintings and Tagger. With Art Detective, anyone can help public art collections across the United Kingdom enhance painting information, uncovering attributions and solve mysteries - through public discussions.
The aim is to engage people with specialist knowledge in a series of public discussions. Anyone, not only art historians, can participate and provide valuable clues.
Art Detective is complementary to Tagger: in Tagger art history enthusiasts can contribute visible subjects to paintings, which are statistically reviewed and used to enhance the Your Paintings search options. Art Detective is about uncovering the invisible issues.
It all starts with a question or a remark. People see a painting on Your Paintings and have a direct link to start a discussion. Discussions are evaluated by a panel of experts to ascertain their value and posted for public debate.
Anyone can intervene and offer clues and proofs. Evidence of claims needs to be provided, with a different range of contributors checking the validity of statements: collections, art historians, etc.
Discussions are divided into interest groups and show the level of activity. More active discussions are at the top.
The list of interest groups is growing as more questions are being asked.
Groups are described, potentially sponsored and linked to other specialist networks.
A theme or groups may include one of more discussions, together with a panel of specific experts - like a community
Art Detective is a personal experience: the website keeps track of comments posted by each user and help build their own profile, which providing tools to store and retrieve discussions that they find interesting.
The whole website is mobile optimised and designed to work well especially in tablets.
Art Detective works! In the first few months of its life, attributions have changed, people and places have been named and dates have been discovered, with many more in the pipeline. Reception from art collections and historians has been enthusiastic!
