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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Walters Art Museum images via Wikimedia
Last year we reported that the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore offers thousands of images from its collection on its website, free to download and use for educational purposes (under a Creative Commons license). More recently, the museum teamed up with Wikimedia Commons to donate more than 19,000 freely-licensed images from its permanent collection that… Read more
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UK’s National Portrait Gallery offers free digital images
The National Portrait Gallery in London now provides free downloads of a large range of images from its Collection for academic and non-commercial projects. Over 53,000 low-resolution images are now available free of charge to non-commercial users through a standard Creative Commons license. In addition, over 87,000 high-resolution images are also free for academic use… Read more
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Invention and Tradition: The Art of Southeastern Nigeria
Herbert “Skip” Cole, UCSB Professor Emeritus of African Art, has announced a new publication Invention and Tradition: The Art of Southeastern Nigeria (Prestel Press). The book “celebrates and explores the sculpture and masks of the many diverse ethnic groups living in Southeastern Nigeria.” For other faculty publication posts, click here and here. Read more
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New dangers to African artifacts
There was a sobering article in the New York Times this weekend about the destruction and looting of African artifacts and archeological sites, primarily in Mali. The author, Holland Cotter, notes that in addition to good old fashioned looting, Al Qaeda-related Islamist groups are destroying sites on fundamentalist religious grounds. He outlines the movement… Read more
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Calisphere: A goldmine of California images and documentation
If you’re not already aware of Calisphere you should have a look at it. A project of the California Digital Library and serving both the UC system and K-12 education, Calisphere is a gateway to a profusion of primary sources about… California! The content comes from all UC campuses as well as non-UC institutions (including… Read more
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An Odalisque with a past
They almost got away with it. Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Pants was discovered stolen from the Sofia Imber Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas, Venezuela in 2002, but in fact it had been stolen at least two years earlier. The thieves had replaced the painting with a copy and no one had noticed, even though the fake… Read more