Tim Webmoor on social software and heritage politics

Great talk last night from Tim Webmoor at our 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. I posted some comments last year from Meg Butler about the Wal-Mart controvery there – [Link]

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.

Aztec dance

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.

Read more at Tim’s website – [Link]

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