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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Art in context: installation photography on Artstor
From The Artstor Blog archive: If you read a review or article about an interesting museum exhibition you missed you can usually find images of the featured artworks. But have you ever wondered how the works were presented, where they were placed? Which pieces were shown together, and in what order? Exhibition design is central… Read more
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Structures of Landscape
The new Tippet Rise Art Center, on an 11,500-acre working ranch north of Yellowstone in the shadow of the Beartooth mountains in Fishtail, MT, was founded as a site for monumental and site specific installations. One of these installations, the ongoing project “Structures of Landscape” by ENSAMBLE STUDIO, currently features large-scale outdoor sculptures Beartooth Portal,… Read more
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New content in MDID: Italian Renaissance Art
We recently acquired a set of over 3,000 beautiful images of Italian Renaissance art from Archivision, the vendor of the high quality content architectural images (35,000!) we already have in MDID (the Image Resource Center’s image database). The images were shot at 19 museums and other sites in Rome, Florence and Naples. In addition to… Read more
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Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: The New Edition
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched an updated Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: The New Edition with a new navigation and interface, updated images, and restructured editorial content. The Timeline is still relational but now with a seamless browsing experience and easily accessible on any device, anywhere. The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History presents a chronological,… Read more
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Artstor image download improvements
Artstor just announced that with the latest system update users can now download individual images as JPGs – they are no longer zip files, which means you save a step. The second bit of good news is that the embedded metadata function is now working, so that information travels with the downloaded image. You can… Read more
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The Museum of Lost Objects
In the ancient city of Nineveh, a statue of a winged bull survived undamaged for 2,700 years – until IS took a pneumatic drill to it last year (see above). With hundreds of thousands of lives lost, millions of people displaced and some of the world’s most significant heritage sites destroyed, the wars in Iraq… Read more