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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Getty celebrating its first digital-born publication
The Getty Research Institute published its first digital-born research project, Pietro Mellini’s Inventory in Verse, 1681: A Digital Facsimile with Translation and Commentary, an unpublished seventeenth-century manuscript in the GRI’s Special Collections. Viewers can examine high-resolution manuscript images that are zoomable, side-by-side windows that compare facsimile, transcription, and English translation, as well as highlighted text… Read more
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The Making of a Roman Silver Cup
If you’re having trouble visualizing how ancient Roman silversmiths fashioned their works, here is a video that deconstructs, and then reconstructs, one of a pair of silver and gold cups currently featured in a rare exhibition of Ancient Luxury and the Roman Silver Treasure from Berthouville on view at the Getty Villa until August 15,… Read more
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New insight into medieval manuscript illumination
How many times have you imagined what artists talked about as they worked? What questions did they ask, what observations did they make, how did they work with others? Well now one writer has got into the heads of two medieval monks as they work on their manuscripts, one more senior and experienced, the other… Read more
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Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante
The digital image of Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante (o/c, 2006) by Chinese artists Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An, comes with more than dozens of “influential people” from world history. It is also interactive, as the figures (and some of the objects and creatures) have all been tagged — roll the cursor over… Read more
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Update on Picasso trove, part 3: The verdict
The Red Dot has been following this story (the initial story, the thickening plot, and the law suit charges) about the electrician who claims Pablo Picasso gave him 271 works of art (lithographs, portraits, a watercolor and sketches created 1900-1932) as payment for work he did for the artist before he died in 1973. Picasso’s… Read more
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Google Art Project expands its Street Art database
Google announced this week that they’ve doubled the number of images in the Street Art section of the Google Art Project. This means over 10,000 high-res images contributed from 85 art organizations from 34 countries. The database is browsable by collection, artist, works of art, or user galleries, but you can also listen to audio… Read more