Craig Dietrich

• Title / Position: Assistant Professor of Cinema Practice
• Organization: University of Southern California
• Website: craigdietrich.com
• Twitter: craigdietrich

Craig Dietrich develops systems for creative and scholarly examinations of transnational culture. Armed with early exposure to online environments such as Silicon Valley's TechMOOseum and an Intermedia MFA from the University of Iowa, Dietrich works in both traditional and new media. He is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Practice at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, part of the School of Cinematic Arts, where he teaches digital studies classes and develops online publication systems as Info Design Director for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-partnered Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. He is further immersed in network culture as a Senior Researcher at the University of Maine’s Still Water Lab.

Dietrich's offline projects include plywood recreations of airports and mall storefronts for the installation project USA Today, and he has recently exhibited (with Vanessa Vobis) at Legion Arts, Cedar Rapids and ArtSpace404, Santa Rosa. He has curated events including the Network of Ecology panel for the IML’s Digital Studies Symposium and an Occupy Roundtable series presented at USC and UCLA. Online collaborations include Scalar, a digital scholarly publishing platform based on Semantic Web technology; the Mukurtu Archive and Plateau People's Web Portal content manager based on Aboriginal cultural protocols; ThoughtMesh, a folksonomic online publishing system; Dynamic Backend Generator, a MySQL-based relational data writing canvas; and Magic, an in-progress experimental interface for examining individual lines of software code for analysis by digital humanists.

Dietrich’s presentations and papers are situated at the intersection of globalization, corporate hierarchies, and local economies. He has recently compared prevalent database paradigms to big-box retail chains, linked Bataille's Formlessness to RSS feeds, and championed custom, agile software over large content management systems for creating digital humanities projects.