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: Traversing Topologies: Imagining worlds and knowledge with/through artistic research
Call for Conference Papers: Traversing Topologies: Imagining worlds and knowledge with/through artistic research (Lucerne / Swiss Artistic Research Network, Sep 23–25, 2021) Deadline: Mar 31, 2021 Topology is to an equal extent an over- and under-determined topos. It exists nearly independently in various individual disciplines, refers foremost descriptively to the arrangement of things in space-time,… Read more
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DH Monday: CFP – TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN Issue 6:1 Histories
Deadline: June 15, 2021 Submission Guidelines: https://tadjournal.org/author-guide/ Submission Portal: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tadjournal For its upcoming issue, TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) seeks submissions exploring the multivalent relationships between technology and the history of the built environment. How are new technologies transforming historical research? How are practitioners and researchers utilizing technology to advance historic preservation, restoration,… Read more
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Alexander Calder’s newly digitized archive now available
The Calder Foundation has amassed and organized an exhaustive archive on Alexander Calder and his work. The archive contains more than 26,000 historic photographs, dozens of films, and thousands of books, magazines, and press clippings, in addition to over 130,000 documents. The Foundation has registered in its archive more than 22,000 works made by Calder,… Read more
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DH Monday: By What Means: CFP ACADIA Special Issue of the IJAC
Special Issue: By What Means: the ACADIA Special Issue of the International Journal of Architectural Computing Paper Submission: March 15th 2021 Decision Notification: April 19th 2021 Revised Manuscripts: May 17th 2021 BY WHAT MEANS Sasha Costanza-Chock’s phrase “By Any Media Necessary” refers to the growing community of practitioners and researchers that are leveraging advanced media,… Read more
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Free to Use and Reuse Image Sets
The Library of Congress’s Free to Use and Reuse Sets features items from the Library’s digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use. Each set of content… Read more
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DH Monday: The Close-up Cloud: Visualizing Details of Image Collections in Dynamic Overviews
Pauline Junginger, Dennis Ostendorf, Barbara Avila Vissirini, Anastasia Voloshina, Timo Hausmann, Sarah Kreiseler and Marian Dörk, “The Close-up Cloud: Visualizing Details of Image Collections in Dynamic Overviews,” International Journal for Digital Art History, vol 5 6.03 (2020_21) Abstract This paper introduces a visualization technique designed to uncover iconographic patterns prevalent within a collection while at… Read more