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Document
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I arrived at George Mason University in July of 2005, a wet-behind-the-ears, just-graduated librarian stuck with the thankless task of running a new institutional repository.
Even before I met him, his presence and CHNM's on campus gave me faith in what I was doing -- some faculty DID care! Not only that, they were writing books and building tools that would help me open the world!
I did have the privilege of meeting Roy at last. The inevitable tall cup of coffee was involved! What struck me about him was his awareness; he really heard what was happening around him, and the complex machinations involved as he assimilated what he heard to what he already knew (and he knew a lot!) were practically visible.
I congratulated him by email when he became a design element on the Create Change open-access website. I was so pleased and proud to be associated with him, even in such a tenuous fashion as working at the same campus in a roughly similar problem space.
The open-access community is much, much the poorer for his loss. As I am.
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89
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Living open access
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You must be 13 years of age or older to submit material to us. Your submission of material constitutes your permission for, and consent to, its dissemination and use in connection with Thanks, Roy in all media in perpetuity. If you have so indicated on the form, your material will be published on Thanks, Roy (with or without your name, depending on what you have indicated). Otherwise, your response will only be available to approved researchers using Thanks, Roy. The material you submit must have been created by you, wholly original, and shall not be copied from or based, in whole or in part, upon any other photographic, literary, or other material, except to the extent that such material is in the public domain. Further, submitted material must not violate any confidentiality, privacy, security or other laws.
By submitting material to Thanks, Roy you release, discharge, and agree to hold harmless Thanks, Roy and persons acting under its permission or authority, including a public library or archive to which the collection might be donated for purposes of long-term preservation, from any claims or liability arising out the Thanks, Roy\'s use of the material, including, without limitation, claims for violation of privacy, defamation, or misrepresentation.
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Dorothea Salo
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chnm
gmu
open access
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As I sit in my cubicle, I glance directly across the room at Roy’s empty office in CHNM and the nameplate for Room 483. Peaking inside his office you can tell that he intended to be back: half-full water bottles and plastic cups stand on the desk; a book with the cover broken in from the grip of a strong hand sits on the table attached to his resting chair waiting to be finished; papers on his desk are ready to be filed, answered, or thrown away. After a quick glance, his black sweater is not visible but it might be hiding on the floor underneath his desk.
He planned to be back at work, just like after other stays in the hospital. Roy maintained such a strong and steadfast commitment to CHNM, his colleagues, and his students throughout the past year and a half that would have been remarkable for a healthy person, never mind for someone carrying around an ever-present opponent in his body.
As we try to figure out what comes next, those of us working in the “west wing” fix our attention on the construction site outside our window. That activity provides an excellent distraction from the emptiness of Room 483.
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39
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Room 483
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eng
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Sheila Brennan
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Sheila Brennan
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research1
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Roy Rosenzweig was my colleague across town at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason. We saw each other at meetings and conferences four or five times a year; I had gotten to know him more personally when my partner worked at the Center for a while. He was warm and generous, obviously the kind of colleague and mentor we all want to have.
Roy had an impressive career filled with distinguished accomplishments. In 2003 he was the second of only five recipients of the prestigious Lyman Award, for outstanding achievement in the field of digital humanities. Others can (and already have) spoken to what Roy did as a teacher, a historian, and as a friend. I want to talk about something he built, because even though I never spent much time at CHNM I do have some experience with running a center.
Running a successful center is hard enough, but building one from the ground up is Herculean. And sometimes, it must seem, Sisyphean. Roy told me about CHNM’s history once, how it began in his office in the history department. And then moved to more palatial digs in a leaky trailer on the George Mason campus. Last year, however, the Center for History and New Media was given pride of place in the University’s new Research I building, a state of the art space that finally offered CHNM the facility it so richly deserved. The amount of invisible labor that goes in to something like that is vast, and not the kind of work that is rewarded (or usually even noticed) in the academy. There’s purchasing. For everything, from paper clips to computers to furniture. There’s hiring and personnel. There’s countless meetings with administrators and other stake-holders. There’s budget work. There’s payroll. There are fortuitous but mission-critical conversations with people in hallways. There’s strategic planning. And that’s before we even get to the Center’s research mission, but in order to pursue that mission there first must be funding. That’s where grant writing comes in. Roy wrote lots of grants and was remarkably successful; but grant writing is not glamorous work. Long, detailed narratives are the backbone of any proposal, and these must strike a pitch-perfect balance between precision and rigor and intellectual energy. Budgets have to be meticulous, laid out in advance literally to the last dollar. There’s all sorts of other documentation that must be prepared, collated, and formatted, all just so.
I’m dwelling on these details because I imagine this was a large part of Roy’s days and nights: invisible, often painstaking but essential work whose rewards are apparent only years later, if at all. But here’s the thing: today CHNM has a staff of over forty populating that state of the art research space. Roy has had lots of help along the way, and the Center’s future leadership could not be in better hands, but if I had to say what Roy did in a sentence it would be this: he created a place where forty people now come to do things that are so exciting that I bet every single one of them has nights they can’t sleep because what they really want is to be back at the Center. This is the pay-off of all the budgets and forms, all the paperwork, all of the long, tedious hours of administrivia: you get to do things so exciting you can’t sleep. Roy created a space where those forty people, and many more in the years to come, will meet, talk, and build things together. Amazing and wonderful and important things.
Thanks Roy, I’m only one of many who will miss you greatly.
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31
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Who Built CHNM?
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You must be 13 years of age or older to submit material to us. Your submission of material constitutes your permission for, and consent to, its dissemination and use in connection with <em>Thanks, Roy</em> in all media in perpetuity. If you have so indicated on the form, your material will be published on <em>Thanks, Roy</em> (with or without your name, depending on what you have indicated). Otherwise, your response will only be available to approved researchers using <em>Thanks, Roy</em>. The material you submit must have been created by you, wholly original, and shall not be copied from or based, in whole or in part, upon any other photographic, literary, or other material, except to the extent that such material is in the public domain. Further, submitted material must not violate any confidentiality, privacy, security or other laws.
By submitting material to <em>Thanks, Roy</em> you release, discharge, and agree to hold harmless <em>Thanks, Roy</em> and persons acting under its permission or authority, including a public library or archive to which the collection might be donated for purposes of long-term preservation, from any claims or liability arising out the <em>Thanks, Roy</em>\'s use of the material, including, without limitation, claims for violation of privacy, defamation, or misrepresentation.
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Matthew Kirschenbaum
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Matthew Kirschenbaum
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chnm
notSleeping
roy
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Where to begin? It’s the only possible response when asked to remember Roy Rosenzweig. Academics are fortunate if they are able to become pioneers or innovators in a single field; Roy managed to found or advance at least three fields: social history, public history, and digital history. And we often suspect that pioneers and innovators have character flaws associated with the dogged pursuit of the cutting edge: narcissism, aggression, humorlessness. Yet everyone who knew Roy was amazed at his unparalleled combination of brilliance, insight, and incredible hard work with humility, generosity, and laugh-out-loud wit.
Eight years ago I received a call from Roy, who had heard through a mutual acquaintance that I had moved to Washington. I only vaguely knew of Roy, and had no idea why he should want to talk to me, but nevertheless agreed to meet him for lunch. I’m so profoundly thankful I answered his call.
Roy and I ate at a restaurant near his house and had some nice conversation. I thought little of our casual meeting until a year later, when Roy called me to say that he had just gotten a grant and had remembered a few points I had made over lunch and how relevant they were to the grant proposal. The only thing I could only remember from a year earlier was that Roy was bursting with energy and ideas and had consumed more coffee over lunch than I drink in a week. We met again for lunch and by the end of the meal he had convinced me to come work with him.
That’s how it began for me, and for countless others. Sitting on a panel with Roy at a conference, meeting randomly over coffee, receiving a congratulatory email from him about an article you had written. No matter how trivial the reason behind the first contact, Roy would remember you, and he would often move these minor encounters—the kind most of us have every day and think nothing of—onto a path toward collaboration and friendship.
I know of no one with as large an address book and as many friends as Roy. But he didn’t just collect these acquaintances superficially, for show or for his own career ends like so many people do on Facebook or LinkedIn. As his social histories of the United States also emphasize, he viewed every human being as a special resource who brings unique talents and ideas into the world, and he liked nothing more than to connect people with each other.
Almost every topic of conversation prompted a welcome referral from Roy: “You should talk to my friend so-and-so, who has done some really interesting work on that subject.” The history of family photos? “She wrote a great article on that.” Standards for library catalogs? “Met this guy at the Library of Congress.” Byzantine art? Documentary filmmaking? Preservation of eight-track tapes? Him, her, and you’re not going to believe this but here’s an email address for you. Now go contact them.
But Roy didn’t just bring his many acquaintances together. He reveled himself in collaborating with others. Roy found it deeply unfortunate that unlike in the sciences, the humanities suffered from a serious lack of collaboration. He scoffed at the mythical ideal of the intellectual toiling alone on the great book. Roy co-authored over a dozen major works, not to mention the scores of highly collaborative digital projects at the Center for History and New Media, which he founded at George Mason University in 1994.
A typical but still remarkable moment occurred when Roy received the Richard W. Lyman Award (presented by the National Humanities Center and the Rockefeller Foundation) in 2003 for “outstanding achievement in the use of information technology to advance scholarship and teaching in the humanities.” He got up on stage, used his computer to project a giant list of names onto a screen, and said, “These are all of the people I collaborated with on the projects that this award honors. These are the people that did the work, and I want to thank them.”
Of course, that was just Roy being his usual humble self. Roy’s collaborators will readily admit not only how wonderful but also how daunting it was to work with him. To paraphrase Paul Erdös, Roy was a machine for turning coffee into publications and websites. With his incredible mind and a large coffee nearly always by his side, he was able to produce such a wide and deep array of creative works. When we were writing a book together I would slowly plod along while insightful, beautiful prose seemed to pop off of his laptop at a disturbingly rapid pace. Working with him on a project forced you to elevate yourself, to do the best you could do.
Long before Roy became ill, the staff at the Center for History and New Media would ponder (when Roy was out of the room) what we would do decades hence, when we expected Roy would finally leave this world. In the spirit of Roy’s humor, some of us decided that we would simply have to preserve his brain in a giant vat of fresh-brewed coffee. Others took their cue from science fiction and thought we could transfer his mind onto silicon for the continued benefit of future generations.
If only we could have done so. But perhaps in a partial sense that is what has happened over the last decade. Roy’s thoughts and vision sit on the Center for History and New Media’s server, silently connecting with thousands of people every day, and his books and articles connect with thousands more.
If only those people could have met Roy Rosenzweig in person. He would have liked to have had coffee with them.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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15
Title
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Remembering Roy Rosenzweig
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You must be 13 years of age or older to submit material to us. Your submission of material constitutes your permission for, and consent to, its dissemination and use in connection with <em>Thanks, Roy</em> in all media in perpetuity. If you have so indicated on the form, your material will be published on <em>Thanks, Roy</em> (with or without your name, depending on what you have indicated). Otherwise, your response will only be available to approved researchers using <em>Thanks, Roy</em>. The material you submit must have been created by you, wholly original, and shall not be copied from or based, in whole or in part, upon any other photographic, literary, or other material, except to the extent that such material is in the public domain. Further, submitted material must not violate any confidentiality, privacy, security or other laws.
By submitting material to <em>Thanks, Roy</em> you release, discharge, and agree to hold harmless <em>Thanks, Roy</em> and persons acting under its permission or authority, including a public library or archive to which the collection might be donated for purposes of long-term preservation, from any claims or liability arising out the <em>Thanks, Roy</em>\'s use of the material, including, without limitation, claims for violation of privacy, defamation, or misrepresentation.
<em>Thanks, Roy</em> has no obligation to use your material.
You will be sent via email a copy of your contribution to <em>Thanks, Roy</em>. We cannot return any material you submit to us so be sure to keep a copy. <em>Thanks, Roy</em> will not share your email address or any other information with commercial vendors.
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Dan Cohen
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Dan Cohen
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Document
chnm
coffee
collaboration
Digital History
personal recollection