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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New Art Historical Digital Resource: BASIRA (Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art)
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies is pleased to introduce the scholarly community to BASIRA (Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art), a new, open-access online database of representations of books and other textual documents in the figurative arts between approximately 1300 and 1600 CE, the period encompassing the advent of print culture in Europe and… Read more
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DH Monday: CFP – Born-Digital Collections, Archives and Memory Conference (April 2-4, 2025 / UCL, UK & online)
Deadline for submissions: Friday, June 7, 2024 Digital research in the arts and humanities has traditionally focused on digitised objects and archives. However, born-digital cultural materials that originate and circulate across a range of formats and platforms are rapidly expanding and raising new opportunities and challenges for research, archiving and collecting communities. Collecting, accessing and… Read more
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DH Monday: 4D Printing? Bridging Additive Manufacturing with Smart Materials
Written by Eduardo Souza, published on May 7, 2024 on archdaily.com. While we are still trying to understand the possibilities and limits of three-dimensional printing and additive manufacturing, a new term has emerged for our vocabulary. 4D printing is nothing more than a digital manufacturing technology -3D printing- which includes a new dimension: the temporal.… Read more
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DH Monday: Quantum leap: how a decade of NFTs has changed digital art
Written by Chris Michaels, published on April 1, 2024 on theartnewspaper.com. The 10-year anniversary of a once-controversial new form of digital art, and disruptor of the art market, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), falls on 2 May. In the lead-up to that anniversary, two important new publications combine to provide the first comprehensive history of a form… Read more
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Lecture Series: Material Migrations I (Apr 29–Sep 9, 2024/online)
The “Material Migrations” lecture series centers issues of object mobility, transcultural dynamics, and notions of connectivity and resistance with case studies from the Middle Ages until today. Connected to the international collaborative research project “Material Migrations: Mamluk Metalwork across Afro-Eurasia”, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and directed by Gertrude Aba Mansah Eyifa-Dzidzienyo and Vera-Simone… Read more
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DH Monday: Looking Forward: The U.S. Copyright Office’s AI Initiative in 2024
More than one year ago, the U.S. Copyright Office launched a comprehensive initiative to examine the impact of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) on copyright law and policy. This blog post highlights the next steps of this ongoing study and summarizes a recent update to Congress from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter. Over the coming months,… Read more