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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Conference: ‘Westsplaining’ in Art History (June 28, 2024/online)
No registration needed – free and open to all. The term ‘westsplaining’ became popularized amongst political theorists in Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and was used critically to denote the ‘phenomenon of people from the Anglosphere loudly foisting their analytical schema and political prescriptions onto… Read more
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DH Monday: CFP – Visuality and Cyberculture International Conference (V-Cybercult 2024) (Nov 1-2, 2024/online)
Visuality and Cyberculture International Conference (V-Cybercult 2024): AI Artistry Unleashed: Image Generation and Creative Synthesis in the Era of Advanced Neural NetworksSubmission Deadline: September 15, 2024 The Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art (ICMA) and the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design at George Enescu National University of the Arts (UNAGE) are pleased to invite… Read more
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DH Monday: CFP – Artl@s Conversation Series in Digital Art History (September 2024-May 2025/online)
Deadline for submissions: July 1, 2024 Following the success of our 2023-2024 seminar “Narrowing the Divide,” we are delighted to announce the call for proposals for the 2024-2025 Artl@s Conversation Series in Digital Art History, themed “Seeking Nuance: Articulating Digital and Non-digital Approaches to Art History.” This online seminar aims to delve into the interplay… Read more
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DH Monday: Panel discussion – Innovative Digital Approaches to Literary Texts in France and beyond
Hybrid round table discussion will take place on Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 3:00-5:00pm BT / 7:00-9:00am PT. While innovations in the Digital Humanities (DH) are increasingly focusing on more visual or multimodal approaches, textual study remains a core component of the work of the majority of Humanities scholars, and particularly those working in English,… Read more
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New Art Historical Digital Resource: Iconclass, 4th edition
On May 14th, the 4th edition of Iconclass launched. This edition has a dataset of images, indexed over the years by a large group of heritage institutions using Iconclass. It also has an iconographic bibliography of more than 60,000 items and deep links to other sources of iconographic information such as the Warburg Institute’s Iconographic… Read more