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
-
Ransom Center makes more than 22,000 images available
The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has adopted an open access policy, removing the requirement for permission and use fees for a significant portion of its online collections believed to be in the public domain. In conjunction with the release of the policy, the Ransom… Read more
-
Miriam Schapiro dies at 91
Painter, sculptor, and printmaker Miriam Schapiro, who helped spearhead the feminist art movement in the 1970s, inspiring generations of artists, died on June 20 at age 91 after a long illness. via Artnews Read more
-
UCSB Acquires Major Chicano/Latino Graphic Art Collections
The UCSB Library has acquired two art collections — The Mission Gráfica and La Raza Graphics — from the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (MCCLA) in San Francisco comprised of roughly 2,000 historical silkscreen print posters from the Chicano / Latino Visual Arts movement plus organizational records from the MCCLA. These will be housed… Read more
-
The rise of New York’s skyline
Experience the historic rise (and a tragic fall) of the skyline of New York as a time-lapse elevator ride to the observatory atop One World Trade Center. Read more
-
Creating interactive timelines
Handy for illustrating both broad eras or shorter time spans, as well as applicable for classroom assignments and conference papers, these web-based tools are great for creating interactive and dynamic timelines: Tiki-Toki: a web app to create interactive multimedia timelines with embedded images, text and even videos (YouTube, Vimeo and AVIs); they also have a… Read more
-
Google Earth Pro is now free
Great news from Google – the Pro version of Google Earth is now free! Features in Pro that were not in Google Earth include the ability to compute distances and area with built-in measurement tools, and to print high resolution images. Learn more, and download, here. When installing, use your email address and the key… Read more