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: CFP: From Iconology to Digital Visual Studies
Call for Papers: Styles Revisited: From Iconology to Digital Visual Studies (online/ to take place every other Monday at 2pm (GMT+1), with the dates a priori considered : September 20, October 18, November 15, December 13, 2021 and January 24, February 7, March 7, April 11, May 16, June 13, 2022)Submission Deadline: May 15, 2021… Read more
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DH Monday: UC Merced/UCSB Library Carpentry Workshop
There will be a joint Library Carpentry workshop with UC Merced, teaching the fundamentals of working with messy data. This workshop is geared toward learners in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences and those who work with messy data. The lessons include Git/Bash, Regular Expressions, and OpenRefine. Learners will learn to: automate repetitive, boring, error-prone… Read more
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The Louvre Has Digitized 482,000 Artworks
Even if a summer in Paris is not possible, one of the world’s most massive museums has announced an encompassing digitization of its vast collection. Read more Read more
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DH Monday: CFP: Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art Call for Submissions, Proposals, and Digital Projects
Submission Deadline: May 1, 2021 The Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art publishes peer-reviewed, open-access, original scholarship on Dutch, Flemish, German, and Franco-Flemish art and material culture from the medieval period through the eighteenth century. We welcome the submission of scholarly manuscripts across a wide range of approaches from authors at every career stage. JHNA… Read more
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Getty Research Portal’s New Overview and Tutorial Video Available
The Getty Research Portal has created an overview and YouTube tutorial video in response to this past year’s experiences with remote teaching and learning. The video, which is approximately 10 minutes long, provides a brief introduction to the Portal’s background and virtual holdings, and demonstrates how to use it. Institutions are encouraged to link to the video in order… Read more
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A New Way to Study Medieval Manuscript Fragments
The Library of Congress is collaborating with the international initiative Fragmentarium.ms to help pioneer digital fragmentology, piecing together long-ago manuscripts that were torn apart or had fallen into pieces over the centuries. Fragmentarium is building an international community around the ability to identify, search, compare, and collect data on medieval manuscript fragments. What does that… Read more