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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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
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Have you seen this painting?
The Boston Globe reports the FBI is using billboards along Boston highways to advertise a substantial reward for any information that might help solve what is considered the greatest art heist in US history. Twenty years ago today, two men posing as police officers stole 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum,… Read more
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Most recent announcements from ARTstor
These collections are now available on ARTstor’s Digital Library: Cook’s Voyages to the South Seas (Natural History Museum, London): 1,647 images of botanical and zoological illustrations associated with Captain James Cook’s expeditions to the South Pacific from 1768 – 1779 (keywords: endeavour botanical OR cook forster OR cook ellis) Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and Estate: 1,172… Read more
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Marina Abramović’s live feed from MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art in New York’s current retrospective of performance artist Marina Abramović includes a live video-feed of the artist in a new work, “The Artist is Present.” The piece, which can be viewed during museum hours through the run of the exhibition (14 March-31 May), is performed in the museum’s Marron Atrium… Read more
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Studying ephemera of American culture
Saul Zalesch, Associate Professor of Art History at Louisiana Tech University, curates a website dedicated to the “identification, preservation, publicizing, and study of ephemeral publications that provide more-nuanced pictures of American culture and life”. The site includes a gallery of more obscure objects (posters and labels, for example, are not included) and readers are encouraged… Read more