The Red Dot takes its name from the small sticker that once marked slides in a physical archive, flagging them as worth a second look. We’re keeping that spirit alive here.
At MIRL, we engage with art history, digital humanities, and material culture through hands-on research and archival projects. Guided by our core principles—critical engagement with visual and material culture, ethical stewardship of images and data, and innovative approaches to research and pedagogy—we work at the intersection of technology and the humanities. We are especially interested in how digital tools can expand the study of images, objects, and spaces.
The Red Dot © 2025 is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
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More good news in digital art history publications: MetPublications
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has made nearly 650 titles published from 1964 to the present available online, which “offers unparalleled in-depth access to the Museum’s renowned print and online publications, covering art, art history, archaeology, conservation, and collecting.” This will be is a huge boost for researchers, who can browse sections dedicated to the… Read more
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New options for electronic art history publications
Publishing art history books has always been fraught with problems: image rights, high quality printing costs, and diminishing opportunities for print publication contracts, to name a few. Yale University Press is, with the help of a Mellon Foundation grant, exploring options to make digital publication a greater possibility for topics in art history. One great… Read more
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California moves forward on free digital textbook access
Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation that will provide popular textbooks to California students as free downloads. The first stage includes State funding for 50 open-source digital textbooks. The second stage will be to establish an Open Source host/library. The goal is to lighten the high prices students now pay for textbooks. It will be interesting… Read more
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Experience the documenta 13 3D tour
For those who were unable to get to Kassel, Germany this summer for documenta 13, here’s your chance to virtually experience installations at all venues. The 360°-Tour offers participants numerous ways to navigate the vast system of projects: by visitor’s favorites (with accompanying video), by a room-by-room “walk through” of each venue, by individual works of… Read more
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Prado’s entire Goya collection now available online
The Museo Nacional del Prado has launched a new website dedicated to beautiful digital images of their entire collection of works and documents by and about Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. Goya en el Prado (available only in Spanish) is divided by medium, then subject, and entries for a few paintings offer supplemental technical… Read more
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Does art still have the ability to shock us?
There’s an interesting multi-part discussion going on in the New York Times about whether art (visual, performance, theater, film, writing, music) can still shock us. Articles revisit some historic events such as the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and the public funding battles in the 1990s over controversial art (such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs… Read more