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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Getty offers free access to the BHA
The Getty Research Institute announced today that the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) is available free of charge on the Getty website. The database also includes the International Bibliography of Art (IBA), which covers the years 2008 and part of 2009. Next phase: the Répertoire de la litterature de l’art (RILA), one of… Read more
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360 degrees and 26 Gigapixels of Paris
“Paris 26 Gigapixels” is a project that has stitched together 2346 single photos of Paris, resulting in a very high resolution (354159 x 75570 pixels!) 360 degree panorama view of the French capital. You can pan manually, or allow it to play on a beautiful slow pan (accompanied by contagious Parisian music); you can zoom… Read more
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Audit of Russian museums follows allegations of widespread in-house theft
The Hermitage and other museums in Russia have apparently been frequent victims of theft by curators and other employees. President Putin ordered a nation-wide audit of museum inventories when he was still in office. The results of the audit will be made public soon but it has been confirmed that at least 87,000 pieces are… Read more
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New use for old slides, Part II
Who wouldn’t want a curtain of slides? This would be a lot of work, but maybe for the retirement years, or summer break, or a project for the kids? The results sure are beautiful. Read more
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JSTOR digitizes auction catalogs
JSTOR, in collaboration with the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, offers a beta website to search auction catalogs from these two institutions. The pilot project digitizes and transcribes select pages from a set of American and British auction catalogs dating from the 18th-early 20th century. Users are encouraged to offer feedback, including… Read more
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Art Handling Olympics
Teams of art handlers turned out for the first ever Art Handling Olympics at Ramiken Crucible gallery in New York on 21 March. Called “equal parts olympic competition, three ring circus, and foreign TV game show,” the events took inspiration from many “worst of” scenarios art handlers face (e.g., psychotic art directors, cruel curators, indecisive… Read more