Archaeological Research Facility

In this presentation, I revisit the digital training that was carried out by myself and colleagues at the UC Berkeley Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology (MACTiA). During the period of its existence (1998-2011) the program transformed itself enormously not only in response to changing hardware and software, but also as our own interests and experience in archaeological education and community building grew, along with our changing (and diverse) viewpoints of what “digital education” meant in practice. I regard the experiments that I was able (allowed and enabled) to carry out in teaching digital practice and media literacy through the MACTiA being the backbone of my own intellectual development during this period and more recently. The collaboration between faculty, graduate and undergraduate students in the MACTiA courses was quite unique, and created many diverse ways of developing digital practices. Throughout this diversity and change, however, there are certain features – notably the encouragement of remediation and re-use of media, a “content-first” attitude, and an “education of attention” - that characterize the “MACTiA style” of digital archaeology and continue to affect our practice.