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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Leonardo da Vinci in Los Angeles
The Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles will host a short-run exhibition that features a rare showing of Leonardo’s drawing Angel in the Flesh (c. 1513-1515). Also included will be selections from Leonardo’s The Theatre Sheet (c. 1506-1508, from the Atlanticus Codex) and video artist Bill Viola’s installation The Last Angel (2002). Opening night, scholar… Read more
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SAHARA and ARTstor
ARTstor has partnered with SAHARA (Society of Architectural Historians Architecture Resources Archive) to include SAH members’ photography. While much of this collection has only been available to SAH members, a large selection, called “Editor’s Choice” is now available to all ARTstor licensors. The SAHARA collection in ARTstor now has nearly 9,000 images, and 72 new… Read more
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Ingres at the Norton Simon
The Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena has announced that Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845) has arrived on loan from The Frick Collection in New York. The portrait, the first loan from the Frick in an art exchange program between the two institutions, will be exhibited October 30, 2009–January 25, 2010. The loan is also… Read more
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Archivision Module 4 now available through ARTstor too
The architectural holdings available to us keep getting better! The Archivision base collection, and modules 1 and 2, have been available in ARTstor to all UC campuses for a few months. Module 4 is the group of 6,000 images that we’ve had available through MDID only (the license for which was won at the VRA… Read more
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Alka Patel’s collection now available in ARTstor
Professor Alka Patel of UC Irvine has worked with ARTstor and UCI VRC staff to contribute over 7,000 of her field research images to the main ARTstor collection. These include the art and architecture of South Asia and Cuba. Read more about the content of this new addition here. This is an important project for… Read more