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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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
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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
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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
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Introducing ArchDaily’s AD Essentials
AD Essentials from ArchDaily is a series of “in-depth overviews of architecture’s most important topics” by connecting together some of their best articles from the past (updated with additional links to relevant news stories and other articles). Launched July 13th, the series has already posted surveys of Sustainability and Modernism. Do you have a topic… Read more
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Next Practices in Museum Digital and Technology
The annual Next Practices in Digital and Technology from the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) is available and highlights 41 examples of recent and ongoing digital initiatives designed by AAMD member museums. From social media and mobile apps, to in-gallery interpretation and behind-the-scenes collections management, Next Practices in Digital and Technology explores the ways museums… Read more
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Artistic genius? There’s an algorithm for that
Researchers say they have created a quantitative way to assess “creativity” in works of art that they argue comes close to a scholarly assessment. Ahmed Elgammal and Babak Saleh (The Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University) used 1,710 paintings available on Artchive.com and ran them through their algorithm that looked… Read more