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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DH Monday: Webinar – The Montias Database: Exploring 17th-Century Dutch Domestic Interiors Digitally
Tuesday, March 21, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. EDT / 9:30 – 10:30 a.m. Live via Zoom Join the Frick Art Reference Library for lunchtime talks spotlighting how the data in The Montias Database of 17th-Century Dutch Art Inventories can be used digitally by art historians to glean new insights. About the Speakers: Weixuan Li, Post-Doctoral… Read more
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DH Monday: CFP – The Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS) Call for Proposals 2023
ILiADS 2023, Davidson College in North Carolina, held in person July 23-28, 2023. Call for Proposals Deadline: March 27, 2023 ILiADS offers a week-long intensive environment for collaborative project teams composed of some mix of researchers, librarians, technologists, and students to build upon established digital pedagogy or scholarship projects and/or launch new ones. To help… Read more
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DH Monday: CFP – Visual Science of Art Conference (University of Cyprus, Nicosia / Aug 24-26, 2023)
Submission Deadline: March 15, 2023 The Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC) 2023 invites all people who connect visual perception and the arts (e.g. empirical, experimental, philosophical, phenomenological, computational approaches) and is an ideal venue to debate and collaborate on all topics associated with the perception and evaluation of artworks. You may submit only one… Read more
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DH Monday: CFP – Umanistica Digitale: Dossier on Digital Art History
Submission Deadline: June 1, 2023 The dossier on “Digital Art History” of Umanistica Digitale collects contributions on the study of methods, approaches, debates and experiments that developed over the last two decades in the field of Digital Art History, particularly along two lines of research that appear dominant today. On the one hand, scholarly studies… Read more
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DH Monday: Digital Humanities and Materiality Online Seminar – “Museikon, from physical to virtual reality: a continuous challenge”
Museikon, from physical to virtual reality: a continuous challenge, Tuesday, February 21, 4:00PM – 5:30PM GMT / 8:00AM – 9:30AM PST, Online via Zoom After securing an EEA Grant, Museikon was required to make their entire collection of icons and ancient books available to the public, which they accomplished by digitizing and displaying the approximately… Read more
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Launch of the Online Database “Antiquitatum Thesaurus”
The online database “Antiquitatum Thesaurus: Antiquities in European Visual Sources from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” is available in open access. “Antiquitatum Thesaurus” investigates prints and drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on artifacts from antiquity, and links them with the ancient objects that they document as well as with other evidence of… Read more