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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Picturing the Netherlandish Canon
The Courtauld Institute of Art has launched a website that reproduces 68 portraits of Netherlandish artists printed in Hendrick Hondius the Elder’s Pictorum aliquot celebrium, præcipué Germaniæ Inferioris, effiges (The Hague, 1610; edition from the British Library). These high quality images are accompanied by translations of the Latin texts and analytical essays by leading scholars. Read more
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Art History Graduate Student Symposium: April 29-30, 2011
Join us for the 36th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium: “Moralities in the Visual Arts”. The symposium kicks off Friday with a 4:00 pm keynote address in Theater and Dance Room 1701 by Richard Dyer (Professor of Film Studies, King’s College, London). Saturday’s panels are in Life Sciences 1001 and conclude with a keynote… Read more
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Latest additions to ARTstor
ARTstor has added these collections to the Digital Library: Fowler Museum, UCLA: 717 images from the permanent collection, with a focus on Africa Richard F. Brush Art Gallery (St. Lawrence University): 196 images of African textiles, contemporary Inuit prints and drawings, and Vietnam War-era photography Colby College Museum: 2,463 images from the permanent collection, especially… Read more
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Talk: David Wilson (Museum of Jurassic Technology) on the Russian Space Program
David Wilson, founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles (a wunderkamer-like museum), will give a talk at UCSB entitled “Nikolai Federov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the Roots of the Russian Space Program.” This story is told partly through live narration of a poetic documentary made by the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Russia,… Read more
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Creating interactive images with Speaking Image
The online application Speaking_Image lets you create, edit and share interactive annotative images. After uploading images (those without copyright infringement), you can isolate and annotate areas of the image for your viewers. Students can also edit these images so they can create interactive and collective study guides as a group (edits are listed so everyone… Read more
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New applications for social media in museums
More and more museums are now using social media and other new technology both to engage their existing audience in new ways and to bring in a new audience. Forward-thinking museums are creating iPhone apps and Facebook pages with interactive elements, and posting myriad content on their websites. There are also interesting new partnerships among… Read more