Timothy Webmoor is a Research Fellow in Science and Technology Studies at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society. He completed his PhD in anthropology at Stanford University in 2008 and has since been the associate director of the Metamedia Lab at the Stanford Archaeology Center. His work focuses upon the role of visual media in the social sciences and the changes in representational theory and practice linked to the advent of digital technologies.

Tim has over five years in a ‘hands-on’ fashion in the development of digital tools and software for archaeologists and anthropologists. His experience ranges from partially immersive, 3-D 'data' archives, to performance pieces in ‘mixed-reality’, to organising cross-disciplinary seminars on the role of visualisation in science. With the lab, he has helped pioneer the use of an STS lens to evaluate how media works in archaeology and the social sciences more generally.

Recent publications discuss the interrelation of visual media in archaeology, epistemological issues of visualisation, the advent of ‘digital heritage’ and the rise of the e-academy, and the ontological turn to things in the social sciences.

Selected publications

2009 in press (with Michael Shanks) 'A political economy of visual media in archaeology,' Re-presenting the Past: archaeology through image and text, Sheila Bonde and Stephen Houston (eds.), Harvard University Press.

2008b From Silicon Valley to the Valley of Teotihuacan: the Yahoo!©s of new media and digital heritage, Visual Anthropology Review 24(2):183-200.

2008a (with Christopher Witmore) Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a social archaeology, Norwegian Archaeological Review 41(1):53-70.

2007b What about "one more turn after the social" in archaeological reasoning? Taking things seriously, World Archaeology 39(4):563-578.

2007a  The dilemma of contact: archaeology’s ethics-epistemology crisis and the recovery of the pragmatic sensibility (pdf), Stanford Journal of Archaeology 5:224-246.

2005 Mediational techniques and conceptual frameworks in archaeology: a model in "mapwork" at Teotihuacan, Mexico, Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):52-84.