Named after the small red sticker that once guided scholars through legacy 35mm slides, The Red Dot is here to help you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of visual and material research. While rooted in the University of California, Santa Barbara community, our posts are open to all.
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.
Here, we’ll share insights on Digital Art History and Architectural History, highlight new image and data resources, discuss copyright and ethical considerations, and spotlight events that shape our field.
The Red Dot © 2025 is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
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Gallery of Lost Art
A new online exhibition, Lost Art, “explores the stories behind the loss of some of the most significant works of modern and contemporary art.” The works of art shown are not only those stolen, but also those which have been destroyed by disasters or neglect, and are all in various states of “loss” — temporary… Read more
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Britain from Above offers historic aerial photographs
The digital project Britain from Above currently contains over 16,000 images (taken between 1919-1953) from the Aerofilms Collection, an important and early aerial photography collection in the United Kingdom. Browse images by group, location or tags, or search by coordinates, date, or text. Users are free to download images or add tags; in fact, the… Read more
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New origin date of the Red Dot discovered!
We thought we’d launched in 2009, but apparently our history goes back a bit further than that. Recent cave painting discoveries put us at 40,000 years old! It’s weird – why can’t we remember. . . . via the BBC news site Read more
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artlibraries.net, a virtual catalogue for art history
The “meta catalogue” artlibraries.net searches through more than 12 million records across 45 libraries. The records include books, articles (in periodicals, conference papers, festschriften, and exhibition books/catalogues), some archival and photographic materials and online resources. Users can also choose searches from particular libraries or return only digital media. For tips on searching through the multi-language catalogue, click… Read more
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An app to keep you writing: Write or Die
If you suffer from writer’s block, or just need to put “the ‘prod’ in Productivity,” there’s an app for that: Write or Die. The app (for iPad or desktop) works when you preset goals with “consequences for distraction and procrastination” if they are not met. You can even set different modes for the consequences, including… Read more
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Treasure trove of prints discovered at NY Public Library
An enormous and valuable stash of images comprising “a visual encyclopedia” of the US in the 1930s and ’40s has been re-discovered. It comprises 41,000 photographs by Roy Stryker, the founder of the Farm Security Administration’s photography documentation project, now at the Library of Congress. (The 175,000-image FSA collection includes the iconic Dorthea Lange “Dustbowl… Read more