Learning about Art History by Exploratory Search, Contextual View and Social Tags

In order to develop a learning environment for art history, we adopted concepts from art education and information technology. In contrast to other user-interfaces for art-databases, we created the explorARTorium1 to compare artworks along different dimensions without having to rely on textual information that excludes people without sophisticated knowledge of art history. Instead, artworks are presented in context among different categories like the oeuvre of the artist, the topic and theme of an artwork as well as the geographical region and time period the artwork was created in. Additional concepts of the explorARTorium are social tagging and tag- clouds. By evaluating the main concepts of the explorARTorium we provide proof that users follow and apply these concepts.