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
-
DH Monday: CFP – Round Table Session: The “More-Than-Human World” in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Visual and Material Culture
Historians of Netherlandish Art Conference 2024 (HNA): Britain and the Low Countries / Cambridge, UK, July 10–13, 2024 Submission Deadline: September 29, 2023 It has been almost thirty years since ecologist and philosopher David Abram coined the phrase “more-than-human world” to describe the endless enmeshment of the human and non-human (including plants, animals, and natural… Read more
-
DH Monday: A Portrait of Tenochtitlan
A Portrait of Tenochtitlan is a reconstruction of the city as it was in 1518. The narrative that accompanies the images can be read in English, Español, and Nahuatlahtolli. “Mexico City is built on top of the ruins of Tenochtitlan. The temples were demolished and the stones were repurposed after the Spanish conquest. The lake has… Read more
-
DH Monday: Seeing Lost Enclaves: Atmosphere and Emotional Space in Relational Reconstruction
The following is a guest post by the Library of Congress 2023 Innovator in Residence Jeffrey Yoo Warren. As part of his residency, Warren will publish a toolkit to empower communities to create relational reconstructions of destroyed neighborhoods of color using 3D modeling methods and historic photographs. In the following post, Warren discusses creating atmospheric… Read more
-
Our Summer of Artificial Intelligence: Copyright Office Hosts Two Webinars on Copyright and AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a significant new focal point for the U.S. Copyright Office in 2023. The Office launched an AI initiative in mid-March, which was followed by four comprehensive listening sessions in April and May and then, most recently, by two very popular webinars in June and July. The webinars, which continued to… Read more
-
DH Monday: CFP – “Embracing the Digital Age: New Prospects for Researching Northern European Art with Computational Methods”
Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) Conference 2024: ‘Britain and the Low Countries: Cultural Exchange Past, Present & Future’ (London and Cambridge, July 10-13, 2024) Session Call for Papers, “Embracing the Digital Age: New Prospects for Researching Northern European Art with Computational Methods” Submission Deadline: September 29, 2023 Over the last two decades, cultural institutions, collaborations,… Read more
-
New Online Resource: Paul M. Rudolph Archive—the color slide series
Check out the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division’s Paul M. Rudolph Archive—the color slide series – you can browse over 20,000 color slides online to see architect Paul Rudolph’s modernist designs from the 1940s to 1990s as well as images used in his lectures. Many of the slides have no known restrictions on… Read more