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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Guggenheim Museum offers new iPad app
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has released a new app for iPad, offering access to the museum’s archival publications and a new visual interface for exploring art. This is in addition to their iPhone and Android handset app that includes multi-lingual building, collection, and select exhibition guides, information on more than 1,600 works in the… Read more
-
A “living” Mona Lisa
A team of 40 French technicians and artists have spent the last year working on a “Living Mona Lisa,” which uses a motion sensor (similar to those employed in interactive video games) to produce a version of the portrait that can follow viewers’ movements with her eyes and change her expression. As Florent Aziosmanoff, who conceived… Read more
-
What’s in your Digital Humanities toolbox?
This list of DH tools was created during the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory; “haystack”) Scholars Unconference at Michigan State University on May 27, 2015. The list in a work-in-progress, with additional tools and insight offered in the comments. Topics include: Media Creation/Annotation (Video/Audio/Image) Project Management Text Processing/Annotation Reference System Archive/Content… Read more