Metamedia

Great talk last night from Tim Webmoor at our Critical Studies in New Media workshop at Stanford.

He is working at the fabulous site of Teotihuacan, Mexico, on different attitudes and understandings of the site - local and beyond. Teotihuacan has become emblematic of the Mexican state and Mexican heritage.

Rather than study the site and people’s reception of it as a conventional anthropological object, he has set up a software network to enable the expression and publication of the different understandings. An active prompting and enabling.

He has done a great service in carefully outling one crucial context for this kind of work - a science that does not, as a guiding principle and premise, separate professional application of reason from vernacular understanding.

All this in pusuit of a way of holding on to different understandings of the past - the multivocality that is much discussed by more and more archaeologists.

Posted by Michael Shanks at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cornelius Holtorf has launched his forthcoming book on the interface between archaeology and popular culture as a 'soft-book' on-line.

Facilitated by the Metamedia Laboratories@Stanford who are anticipating the informational movement from traditional print/distribution to digital format, Holtorf has been able to immediately release his book in a more accessible and ''free'' public sphere prior to conventional publication. The fit between the ''blogosphere'' as a digital and interactive public culture venue and the theme of Holtorf's book blends content/form.

He describes the intention of the new soft-book:
'"This book is about the portrayal of archaeology in contemporary popular culture. It is not a manual for a better didactics improving the public understanding of the discipline of archaeology. There will be important lessons for professional archaeology to be learned, but these lie on a more general level than specific methods and approaches applicable to individual public education initiatives."
The digital or soft-book may be visited@:http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/PopularArchaeology/Home.

Posted by Timothy Webmoor at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)