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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LA museums embracing digital innovations
Culture Monster highlights innovative examples of how various museums in Los Angeles are using digital technology: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles: Interactive CT scans offer another way to access mummies Autry National Center: In the exhibition space, first-person stories of characters features in the “Civil War” exhibit play as films from user-activated “daguerreotypes” (and,… Read more
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New US history photo and news archives
An LA Times article today highlights two archives of great interest to students of US history: Photogrammar and Chronicling America. Photogrammar is based at Yale University, and contains 170,000 photos commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information between 1935 and 1945. The photographs are actually housed at the Library… Read more
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Open Access Week at Davidson Library
Open Access Week is an annual international event that promotes open access as a new norm in research and scholarship. Please join us for any or all of the Library’s Open Access Week programs to learn about trends and challenges in scholarly publishing. Programs held during the week include: Reinventing Scholarly Publishing: UC Press. Monday,… Read more
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Digital heritage preservation
CyArk is an international organization (actually a consortium of numerous partners) that strives to digitally record architectural and archaeological sites, using 3D scanning technology. They create 3D data sets, or ‘point clouds’, using laser scans, then join these data points into a digital mesh wire frame. Their projects are international and wide-ranging, including ancient rock… Read more
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Countering ISIS monument destruction with Million Image Database Project
In a “digital race against IS,” The Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) is working with UNESCO World Heritage and NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World to launch a Million Image Database Project. The hope is to capture one million 3D images of at-risk objects by the end of 2016 by deploying up… Read more
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Breaking news and surveillance footage of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist
Earlier this year, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum “celebrated” the 25th anniversary of the as-yet-unsolved heist of 13 works of art from their collection. Now the FBI has released a video taken the night before the heist that appears to show a night guard letting an unauthorized guest into the museum. Authorities are seeking the… Read more