From Stanley Spencer and Ben Nicholson to Rachel Whiteread and Tacita Dean, London's Slade School of Fine Art has an impressive track record of training pioneers of the art world. But the fate of some of its lesser known alumni is something of a mystery.

What became of those who shared studio space and life drawing classes with the likes of Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton is a question that has become the subject of a groundbreaking investigation that employs techniques never used before in art history. It is hoped the project will reveal an even richer history of the Slade and correct a western-centric bias in the art world.

The school has an archive of annual class photographs of fresh-faced students dating back to 1931. To the frustration of art historians, the names in the photographs are rarely identified, which is why the Slade is now turning to the collective wisdom of the internet.

The dusty collection of prints has been digitised and put online to allow former staff and students, as well as members of the public, to identify those in the photographs. "The field of art history has done very little with digital media," said Melissa Terras, director of the UCL's centre for digital humanities, who is co-running the archive project.

The class photos do not just show the Young British Artists – or YBAs – of their day; they also reveal artists on international scholarships from the rest of world whose work may well have been overlooked. It is the identity and careers of international art students in London in the 50s in particular that the Slade is especially interested in, Terras said.

One of the few photographs to have been properly labelled illustrates the breadth of artistic talent at the Slade. The class of 1953 included the painter Michael Andrews and Portuguese artist Paula Rego, who went on to marry the painter Victor Willing.

The teachers in the photograph are no less stellar. They include Graham Sutherland, William Coldstream, Henry Moore and Lucian Freud. Also in the photograph are Khalid Iqbal, who went on to be a celebrated landscape painter in his native Pakistan, and Sam Ntiro, the first east African artist to get a show in New York and Tanzania's former high commissioner to Britain.

"We're trying to capture those bits of historical ephemera before they disappear forever," Professor Susan Collins, the current head of the Slade, said. "We are leaving space for comments as well as identification, to help trigger memories and capture stories."

Collins pointed out that the father of modern Israeli sculpture, Yitzhak Danziger, studied at the Slade in the 1930s. "I seem to be tripping over Slade alumni wherever I go," she said, admitting she had previously had no idea that the founding father of Bangladeshi art, Zainul Abedin, was also a former student at the college.

"They [Danziger and Abedin] have gone on to be hugely influential in their own countries and we don't recognise them," Collins said. "We are really interested in using these photographs as a way of navigating those other art histories, and joining the dots. It is an opportunity to celebrate and acknowledge those histories."

"With a rise in interest and understanding of the global in contemporary art, it seems very timely to revisit these histories." She added: "The key driver for the initiative is to find a way to map the Slade diaspora. So as well as uncovering images over the years of the many well-known artists in this country who taught and studied at the Slade, we hope that we may discover more, lesser known histories of artists who may have made key contributions around the world."