<![CDATA[Thanks, Roy]]> http://thanksroy.org/items/browse?tag=chnm&output=rss2 Tue, 14 Jul 2020 21:12:10 -0400 vmuchhal@gmu.edu (Thanks, Roy) Zend_Feed http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss <![CDATA[Roy at Pohick ]]> http://thanksroy.org/items/show/634 http://thanksroy.org/Imgs/roypohick2_725f3980d5.jpg ]]> Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:53:58 -0500 <![CDATA[Roy in Pohick]]> http://thanksroy.org/items/show/633 http://thanksroy.org/Imgs/roypohick_32c8106d13.jpg ]]> Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:53:57 -0500 <![CDATA[Roy in a Who Built America" T-Shirt"]]> http://thanksroy.org/items/show/626 http://thanksroy.org/Imgs/roywba2_e5368f9af4.jpg ]]> Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:53:54 -0500 <![CDATA[How Roy Changed My Life, Part 3]]> http://thanksroy.org/items/show/620 http://thanksroy.org/Imgs/roy-simon2002_8d1e4f18be.jpg ]]> Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:53:48 -0500 <![CDATA[CHNM running group]]> http://thanksroy.org/items/show/608 http://thanksroy.org/Imgs/dscf0275_cda9beceb5.jpg ]]> Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:53:34 -0500 <![CDATA[Morning Coffee with Roy, Roy as Mentor""]]> http://thanksroy.org/items/show/556

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I was Roy’s student and worked with him at the Center for History and New Media for ten years. Working with Roy gave me a skewed, somewhat utopian perspective of what academia was really like. He was always happy to meet with me. He read all of my chapters within a week. He was in the audience when I presented my first conference paper and many times when I presented afterward. His letters of recommendation were written well before the deadline and required no reminder. One would expect that it would be stressful to have an adviser who was also your boss. And yet looking back at emails from that period it seems that it was me who constantly complained about needing to prepare a job talk or a paper, and it was Roy who always patiently sacrificed deadlines to give me time off. In fact, his Center have provided, and still does, this kind of flexible support to dozens of graduate students who have worked there through the years. Roy even gave me rides from campus to the metro occasionally so I didn’t have to take a bus. I was completely spoiled. I actually thought it was a matter of course to expect all these things from your adviser until I talked to my friends and found out that theirs did nothing of the sort.

Today, now that I know how rare that experience had been, I would like to mention some things that I learned from Roy.

For example, Roy taught me some of my English, my second language. From him, I first heard words like “deep-six,” as it “to deep-six this unconvincing argument,” and academic stock phrases such as “a study that fills a much-needed gap.” I learned my email-speak from Roy—how to say “thanks!” constantly no matter how trivial the task done for you; how to send encouraging one-liners, “That’s great! Roy,” in response to emails most people would ignore; how to preface work assignments with “whenever you have time” and “no rush on this,” when you really mean “do it as soon as you can.”

Roy taught me how to be a researcher. He researched everything. At the first memorial for Roy at George Mason University in Arlington, a friend of his described how Roy embarked on a research project to get a letter to the editor published in the <em>New York Times</em>. He determined the published letters often started with “We are shocked and dismayed,” and used the phrase. The letter was published. Roy demanded the same dedication from his students and research assistants. I still remember how I spent hours going through the <em>Washington Post</em> in search of a Doonesbury cartoon for him that gave the only two possible reasons for producing web sites as “fear and greed,” and then through the Hearst press from the 1940s in search of an anti-Sidney Hillman limerick, to include on the <em>Who Build America</em> CD. The limerick was not printed when Steven Fraser’s book <em>Labor Will Rule</em> claimed it would be, but several weeks later. None of his students could get away with close readings of a few texts—a method then popular in my field of historical cultural studies. I don’t need to refer to <em>The Chicago Manual of Style</em> to format my book; I can refer to Roy’s and Elizabeth Blackmar’s <em>The Park and the People</em>, a study that cites every possible kind of source, and has the most elaborate abbreviation system I have yet to encounter in a work of scholarship.

Roy taught me how to comment on other people’s work. When he showed me how to rewrite completely one of my less successful drafts, in a 5-page single-spaced line-by-line commentary, he was quite direct and at times sarcastic. To one of my wilder propositions he responded, “I am prepared to believe that this is the case, but the claims here seem to rest on two anecdotes.” Yet he was also kind—he also used, quite without foundation, words “perceptive,” “well-written,” and “wonderful,” the latter three times. I’m not sure Roy was capable of writing comments that were not detailed—he gave such thorough responses not just to dissertation and book chapters but also to papers he assigned in his Clio Wired class (an introduction to digital history) that he invented and taught for years.

Roy taught me how to be a radical historian. I read mounds of books that claimed to provide ever more radical readings of various practices and texts. In contrast, it was useful to encounter Roy’s less ostentatious, everyday brand of radicalism. At the first memorial for Roy at George Mason University in Arlington, Alison Landsberg, his friend, colleague, and neighbor, read an email from Roy and Deborah from 2003 where they invited friends to participate in an antiwar candlelight vigil in Arlington, Virginia. “If there is interest,” they wrote, “we would be happy to organize a group dinner of take out food at our house before hand (5:30?) or after.” At the time it seemed that mass demonstrations in DC, while inspiring to participants, changed neither gender policies nor war plans of the Bush Administration. Yet Roy never gave up. Every single one of his projects—from an antiwar vigil to his work at the <em>Radical History Review</em> to convincing the AHA to make articles in the <em>American Historical Review</em> available for free on the web—aimed at getting things done. The Center for History and New Media, which he founded to democratize history, is perhaps his most important work of radical scholarship.

Most importantly, in doing all of the above, Roy taught me how to be a human being. He ignored no one—at every meeting or party, he would make sure to find the least important person in the room and strike up a conversation. Even after he became ill and was often tired he continued to help colleagues, advise students, direct the Center, and of course, answer his email. Many people had no idea how ill he was and where shocked by his passing because he never stopped being Roy, in any circumstances.

I miss the sense of security Roy gave his students immensely and yet I will always have his sense of purpose in doing history. Most of all, I miss him. Thanks, Roy.
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Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:08:39 -0500
<![CDATA[Coffee with Roy, Roy as New Media Historian""]]> http://thanksroy.org/items/show/554

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“Roy as New Media Historian”
OAH, March 29, 2008

Yesterday was my birthday and something didn’t happen that I had come to rely on for the past quarter century: I didn’t receive a wonderfully witty and politically astute card from Roy wishing me a happy birthday. That kindness and attention to personal detail were the essence of our dear friend and colleague and one of the things I will sorely miss in the years to come.

I don’t think you can separate Roy and his various identities as historian, as we are trying to do here today, from the quintessential fact that he was an unusually kind and generous human being. That generosity extended to all of Roy’s connections and relationships, whether he was reading and editing, multiple times, thick manuscripts; writing untold numbers of job references and letters of recommendation for students, colleagues, and friends; or engaging in serious gossip about the historical profession and the personal quirks and idiosyncrasies of its self-involved and self-regarding practitioners.
My job today is to talk about Roy as a new media historian. But to do that I need first to establish what I see as five essential truths and political commitments that defined Roy’s entire career:

• broadening the subject of historical inquiry;
• fighting for the democratic possibilities of doing and communicating history;
• overcoming the theoretical obfuscations that marred so much scholarly writing;
• finding new ways and presentational forms to convey historical ideas to a broad public audience; and, most of all,
• working collaboratively.

Roy loved to collaborate, which was especially evident in his early and vigorous embrace of new media as a form that could reshape the way we thought and learned about the past.

Roy and I entered the wonderful world of computers together, buying matching Kaypro II computers in 1982, Roy to do academic work and my ASHP colleagues and me to write the WBA? textbook. Our early shared use of computers led us to start poking around the emerging field of computer controlled media in the late 1980s. I was down in Arlington visiting some time around 1989 and Roy and I took the Metro into DC near Union Station to visit an exhibit of computer controlled training programs that some company or museum had on display. Out of that experience emerged the idea to use new media to do a new kind of history. We’d been doing films and videos at ASHP (Roy was a valued consultant on these productions) but the computer opened new and seemingly limitless vistas for teaching and learning and for working collaboratively. Roy immediately grasped that new media, because of its complexity and technical demands, necessitated collaboration. He was thrilled at that prospect.

I guess my fondest memories of working with Roy as a new media historian go back to the origins of our first new media venture, which centered on researching and writing the considerable amount of text that introduced and framed the rich multimedia content of the Who Built America? CD-ROMs that we (meaning the American Social History Project and Roy) conceived and developed together. Much of that writing took place in Roy’s book-lined and paper-strewn office in Roy and Deborah’s Jackson St. house in Arlington. I’d move in for a week or two at a time to work closely with Roy, which consisted of being chained (metaphorically speaking) to a computer all day and well into every evening, working with the kind of intensity, focus and sheer sense of discovery that defined everything that Roy did.

I could never manage to keep up with Roy’s output or his brilliant historical insights (I don’t think any of his collaborators did), though I tried damned hard to do so. I learned pretty quickly that the best thing you could do was push yourself, work hard and then sit back and appreciate Roy’s incredible ability to work harder and produce more. Even our hard working team of a dozen or more comrades at ASHP was not enough to keep up with Roy, leading him to create and head up his own new media history operation at GMU, the Center for History and New Media. And, as I think about it, even Roy’s CHNM colleagues, who numbered more than three dozen before he died, can no doubt attest that they couldn’t keep up with Roy, either. I know I speak for all ASHPers and CHNMers when I say that to have been able to collaborate with Roy on imagining and realizing history in new media was a privilege, allowing us all to engage in a common project that helped redefine the way history was thought about and presented.
Roy’s influence will be felt for years to come in the profession and beyond. I am certain that he will be remembered not only for his staggering intellectual output, but also for the endearing friendship and support that he offered to so many people, inside the profession and far beyond it. Thanks, Roy, not only for your brilliant intellect and tireless work ethic, but much more for your extraordinary generosity of spirit and for your kind heart.
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Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:08:39 -0500
<![CDATA[Coffee with Roy, Roy and CHNM""]]> http://thanksroy.org/items/show/553

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Coffee with Roy
March 29, 2008

In thinking about what to say this morning, in thinking about Roy and the Center for History and New Media, I looked through the hundreds of entries on the Thanks, Roy website, many from former and current CHNMers, and was once again struck by the eloquence, the humor, the passion for social justice, and the incredible work ethic that comes through—all things that Roy both embodied and fostered in others.

I also looked at the tags and the themes that had emerged. Some were to be expected—coffee, history and digital history, the ever-present red (or maroon) shirt and jeans. Many others were also no surprise to those who knew and worked with Roy—decency, kindness, generosity, humility.

One tag that drew my attention was “driving.” It reminded me of a drive I took with Roy shortly after I started working at CHNM. We were flying to New York City to meet with Josh, Ellen, and Pennee about History Matters. Roy and Deborah lived close to National Airport, so I drove from my home in Maryland, parked at their house, and Roy drove us to the airport. On the way, Roy started telling a complicated, engaging story about the “ins and outs” of publishing Who Built America—the curious twists and turns, the quirky individuals and intrigues along the way. Somewhere in there, we exited the GW Parkway and entered the airport, the circular drive that takes you past the various parking garages, the passenger drop off, the rental cars. And as Roy talked and drove, we passed the rental cars, the departures and arrivals, and the parking terminals A, B, and C. And we drove right back out of the airport and onto the parkway.

Roy was a devoted storyteller and deeply engaged in many interesting, intellectual ideas at any given moment. In this case, Roy’s passion for making history public, making it available and accessible, for telling the stories of ordinary people, and his fascination with the sometimes convoluted path that it took to do so led to a new way of reaching the airport, but one that worked in the end nonetheless. We found our way back to the airport and made the plane in plenty of time.

Working with Roy for more than 7 years at CHNM, I came to appreciate and cherish that some days were like this. That getting from point A to point B might take an unexpected path. But whatever the path, Roy had the remarkable ability to stay focused on the important things in life—people, history, and open access to the past—through untold histories as well as through technology. In day-to-day work, sometimes get distracted by annoyances or minor setbacks, but Roy always had the truly admirable ability to keep things in perspective, to focus on the larger meaning of the work.

In a discipline known for the work of individuals, Roy was dedicated to collaboration (another popular tag on Thanks, Roy) and to breaking down traditional boundaries. Roy remained committed to the process of collaboration, even when it was slower and messier than working alone, as it usually is.

In part, I think it is because Roy knew the advantages of bringing together a range of minds and ideas, of sharing and discussing. But he also truly enjoyed working with people—talking, listening, developing ideas collaboratively. As CHNM grew from one full time employee, Elena, and a few graduate assistants to a staff of more than 40, this got harder to do. Roy’s days were filled, truly packed from beginning to end, with email, meetings, problems to be resolved, grants to be written, and ideas to be grappled with. But he always made time to get to know each person who was hired, to help them make connections and plan their futures; to make sure that they felt welcome and a part of the larger purpose of CHNM and its work.

Roy signed his emails “Take Care, Roy” and this he always did—of the past and of the present, of the stories and the people.
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Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:08:39 -0500
<![CDATA[Working with Roy]]> http://thanksroy.org/items/show/548

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What follows is a speech I wrote for the special AHA session in Roy’s memory on January 5, abridged to avoid duplicating my other post on this site.

I worked with Roy at the Center for History and New Media for ten years, from 1995 to 2005, and he also was my thesis adviser form 1998 until I graduated in 2004. I will talk about what it was like to work with him at the Center and to have him as a mentor. And because my relationship with Roy was mediated by technology I’ll talk about Roy’s relationship with technology as well.

Several times in conversations with Roy I heard him speculate why there are not more hit TV series and movies about historians. TV shows and films about doctors and cops are popular, he used to say, because they are always urgently needed to save lives somewhere. If only we could come up with an emergency that would urgently require an intervention by a historian, played perhaps by Nicholas Cage or Angelina Jolie, who could rush to the scene and save the day, the discipline would have much better representation in American popular culture.

I think Roy was skeptical about this possibility. However, in some ways, working with Roy was like this imaginary action movie. It was exciting and it was full of emergencies.

I began working at the Center as its only employee. The center was Roy, Mike O’Malley, and me, with a standard Mac desktop for a server, located in a closet in a former student dormitory, with only six web pages on it. Of course, now there are dozens of historical websites and tools produced at the Center, but for the first few years we only had two or three. Eventually, we could afford top-of-the-line equipment and put it in a secure facility with multiple backups, but for the first few years that wasn’t an option. Web servers crash. Roy however, refused to acknowledge that fact. Once on an anniversary of 9/11 Jim Sparrow and I accidentally unplugged the machine that was serving millions of connections to our September 11 Digital Archive, and could not restart it for several minutes because the database got corrupted. For Roy, who was pacing back and forth watching us trying to repair the damage, every second our historical data stayed offline was agony.

There were times when Roy would drive in to GMU’s Fairfax campus himself on a snow day—a real emergency in Virginia—to restart a crashed server as soon as possible. Roy never asked me outright to drop everything and spend 5 to 10 hours trying to work out the problem but he had a way of pausing on the phone, or nervously walking around in person that conveyed the message very well.

I can’t say I didn’t resent the havoc Roy’s work ethic did to my social life. If I had a dinner engagement, I cancelled it. If I was on vacation in San Francisco, I had to go into a closest café with wireless to solve problems remotely. Immediately after arriving to any city, I looked for Starbucks coffee shops (that were guaranteed to have wireless access), to be ready in case an emergency would occur.

Once I was on the metro right before Ballston station on my way to work when I got a call from Roy. It turned out that Pennee Bender from the American Social History project was presenting on our History Matters site at a conference. Her presentation was to start in 5 minutes and she just discovered that the search page didn’t work. I had to get off the train, out of the Ballston station, into the Starbucks, and fix the search in 5 minutes—as always for Roy, failure wasn’t an option.

At first I was surprised at how seriously Roy took every glitch, but then I realized that he did this because he had a strong sense of purpose and a clear idea of how to accomplish it. For him, history only made sense as a democratic project. He believed that digital media could democratize history, and to this end he produced historical websites, spoke at innumerable meetings, wrote grant proposals, and promoted collaborative and open source scholarship. Keeping the server always on was just a minor manifestation of his larger vision and his determination to accomplish it.

Working with Roy as a student resembled an action film in a different way—the emergencies where all mine and he was the one who saved the day. Quite simply, I would not be a historian today if it wasn’t for Roy. I’m Russian, and it would have been impossible for me to finish school if I didn’t have a job at CHNM at the same time. He had to fill out mounds of extra paperwork to hire me, and when my American visa got delayed for two months, Roy didn’t give up and kept the job open for me when he didn’t have to.

Many students claim being close to their advisers—Roy was generous in ways that this common phrase doesn’t really describe. He would be always happy to meet with me, and always enthusiastic about my work, but when a conversation would approach a conclusion, he would just say “Ok” with a certain inflection, and I would know that I had to get out of the office so he could move on to other work. We communicated as much over email and instant messaging as in person. Roy once told me how he and Deborah, working on two separate floors of their house, simultaneously got emails with links to the YouTube video of Stephen Colbert mocking President Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Only later did they realize that they were watching the video on different computers at the same time. One could imagine that Roy and Deborah sometimes communicated by email in the house as well. But in my case, the way Roy used email was much more valuable than any heart-to-heart conversations we didn’t have.

It was remarkable enough that Roy could answer an email within seconds if it was about Center business, but what I appreciated even more was that when I asked him to help with my own work his responses were just as fast. During the celebration of Roy’s life in December, people were offering statistics on thousands of emails they got from Roy. Here are some statistics on how little time it took for Roy to get back to me over email about my research.

Reading and commenting on my book prospectus: 17 hours

Reading and commenting on reader reviews of my book manuscript: 9 hours

Answering a question about my dissertation: 10 minutes

Answering the last question I asked him, about a book we both had read, on September 26, 2007: 2 hours.

How Roy found the time to reply this fast, I have no idea. He knew and communicated with so many people in the US and beyond—when I was about to move to Montreal to teach Roy sat down with me and gave names of a half a dozen digital humanities scholars he knew in Canada. In September 2005, over iChat, I asked Roy to read something of mine, and as always, he immediately agreed. Then he tried to figure out when he would actually do it. Here is what he wrote on IM:

Roy Rosenzweig: maybe not this weekend

Roy Rosenzweig: but monday

Roy Rosenzweig: maybe

Roy Rosenzweig: i have plane flight and hopefully could do then

Roy Rosenzweig: i have picnic tomorrow and then antiwar march

Roy Rosenzweig: and then various people are staying over

Roy Rosenzweig: i have conferences all next week

I know that what he had done for me he did for hundreds of other people. Thanksroy.org is full of testimonies of people he helped. I think he was such a perfect mentor precisely because one didn’t have to be his favorite student or colleague to count on his help and unwavering support. His commitment to social equality was not just academic, it encompassed everything he did—researching working-class culture, helping students, going to antiwar rallies, and lobbying for open source scholarship. Many brilliant historians exist but I haven’t met anyone as ethical and committed as Roy. He provided more than conventional history instruction; he taught by example.

Roy was always there when one of his friends, colleagues, or students needed help yet anything more than a cursory expressions of gratitude made him uncomfortable. I got so desperate about this that when Roy asked me to write a letter in support of a grant the Center was applying for, I used the letter to thank him for many things he had done for me, and then asked him to proofread it to make sure that he actually looked at the words. Among other things, I wrote, “It would not be an exaggeration to say that my years at CHNM”—and as Roy’s student—“transformed my understanding of the purpose and practice history. I will always be grateful for this experience.” Thanks, Roy.
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Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:08:39 -0500
<![CDATA[Living open access]]> http://thanksroy.org/items/show/528

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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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Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:08:38 -0500
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