Education
He attended Adrian C. Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, California.
He attended Adrian C. Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, California.
Dietrich began his multimedia career as an Exhibit Engineering Assistant at The Technical Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California. In 2008, he was a professor in the University of Maine New Media Department and continues as a researcher at UMaine"s Still Water laboratory Beginning in 2009, before moving to the Claremont Colleges, he was on the faculty of the Division of Media Arts and Practice, part of the School of Cinematic Arts, at the University of Southern California ( University of Southern California), where he taught media studies and multimedia production.
Dietrich was the first lead developer of the Mukurtu Archive, a media content manager based on the Warumungu community Dillybag.
The project sparked discussion on Digital Rights Management and archival support of non-Western cultural protocols. Lawyer Wendy Seltzer describes, "Rather than fight copyright norms with bad code, we should learn from the Warumungu and build code (and law) to support social practice."
In 2005, he authored the Dynamic Backend Generator (DBG) with his team at the Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular.
The tool, at its core a MySQL database manager, has been used by a variety of digital humanities projects including Public Secrets, Blue Velvet and Killer Entertainments, and is described as a scholarly "intellectual sketchpad."
Dietrich is the Info Design Director for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, which produces Scalar, an online publication platform principally designed with Creative Director Erik Loyer. Dietrich has publicly positioned Scalar"s framework in opposition to prevalent web-based content managers such as WordPress, whose use, according to Dietrich, equates to "shoving content into rigid frameworks." Rather, as he describes, Scalar"s foundation is Semantic Web technology that flexibly stores content and bridges Scalar to partner media archives such as those kept by the Internet Archive and Shoah Foundation.
Dietrich lives in West Adams, Los Angeles, near the University of Southern California"s University Park campus.