Roy Rosenzweig and the Field of Digital History: A Tribute

William G. Thomas, III

October 15, 2007

Roy Rosenzweig died October 11, 2007, in Virginia. The Washington Post's obituary recognized Roy as a "Digital Historian" and in its long column it told of the reach of his career and the pioneering path he took. Roy influenced the ways historians across the world understand their discipline, and at every opportunity he invited us to join him. Every piece he wrote on "digital history" was a welcoming, careful, thoughtful look at how digital technologies are reshaping scholarly practice and opportunities.

Roy's legacy will be significant in digital history both as the founder of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media (CHNM), and as the author of influential articles in the Journal of American History and the American Historical Review. He guided the research division of the American Historical Association toward a deeper engagement with the digital medium and he served as the founding editor of the web site reviews section in the Journal of American History. In this way Roy organized the professional journals and associations to accept and consider digital scholarship.

At the AHA Workshop "Entering the Second Stage of Online History Scholarship" in January 2004, Roy argued that we were entering a new phase of digital scholarship. The first stage he said was one of "pioneers" and the work was frankly experimental, unpredictable, open-ended, and difficult to sustain and preserve. The second stage, Roy explained, would be more institutionally grounded, more permanent, and characterized by common standards. As carefully as he could, Roy struck an important balance at that moment-between the inventiveness, creativity, and idiosyncratic nature of author-constructed digital history and the sustainable standardization of cyberinfrastructure-oriented digital history. I do not think that Roy saw these phases as incompatible but he did think then that we needed to be developing structures to support and sustain the creative works that historians were building. The problem Roy identified has not really gone away, and three and a half years later, we are still trying to balance these stages. Some of the most innovative digital history work has come from the first phase but there are still serious questions about its sustainability. Roy would want us, I think, to keep balancing these priorities: creativity and sustainability, experimentation and compliance with standards.

But Roy played an equally crucial role in the development of younger scholars in digital history. He gathered graduate students, technical professionals, librarians, and educators around the Center for History and New Media and cultivated there an energetic and ambitious set of research, teaching, and outreach projects. When I was just starting at the University of Virginia, Roy had just launched the CHNM at George Mason University, and when Ed Ayers and I founded the Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) at the University of Virginia in 1998, Roy was deeply supportive. Within Virginia we were blessed, it seemed to me, to have two of the state's major public universities pursuing digital scholarship in history in different but complementary ways. At VCDH we could feel the innovation and creativity pulsing out of Northern Virginia at Roy's CHNM and it was a constant source of inspiration and comfort. Roy provided such stable and consistent leadership in the field of digital history and down in Charlottesville ninety miles south of Roy's Center we could sense that leadership and rely on it every day.

For me personally Roy's support came in other meaningful ways. When Ed Ayers and I began our digital article, "The Differences Slavery Made," Roy offered to have a workshop on it at CNMH. After the piece was published in the American Historical Review, Roy invited us to participate in several conference sessions at the OAH and the AHA meetings on the future of digital scholarship. At one of these meetings in San Jose, CA, in 2005, Roy characterized "The Differences" article as "hypertraditional." He meant it both as a compliment and as a challenge. We historians needed, he seemed to be saying, to follow a deep historiographical tradition in whatever medium we worked. We had an obligation to interpret. And although we might need to build archives, we could not leave the interpretation to others, even in hypertext. Roy looked to the future and asked at every opportunity, what the practice of history would be like when we historians had millions of digital objects, perhaps the entire human textual record, online and searchable. And so he encouraged our attempt to frame our digital work around inquiry, research, evidence, and interpretation. At the same time, Roy suggested, we needed to embrace the many forms and genres that the digital medium allowed and not remain so wedded to our traditional modes of scholarly communication that we would lose our audience or miss the opportunity to create alternative models for our histories.

Roy understood early on, more than just about anybody, the startling possibilities that emerged with the World Wide Web and the simple browser technology that Mosaic developed in 1993. The Web would advance history in new ways for students and teachers to be sure, but Roy could see then just how much history would probably end up on the Web. Today, as we survey the Web we find history everywhere: Wikipedia, railfan sites, Civil War sites, genealogy, family history, Library of Congress digital archives, and all manner of digital history projects. History in the broadest sense has migrated to the Web with surprising speed and versatility. Roy anticipated all of this and his sense of the coming changes only became more prescient. His 9/11 Archive pioneered the shared, collaborative nature of the new generation of web-based communities and hosted services before there was a "web 2.0" movement. The list of his innovative approaches might properly extend back to the 1980s with his CD-ROM "Who Built America?" and, more recently, to Zotero, his CNMH team's software project designed for historians to use the Web in their everyday research. Roy and his colleague Dan Cohen took on the challenge of articulating the best practices in the field of digital scholarship. In 2006 they published the book Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.

Roy, of course, spoke most often to academic historians and he asked us to consider participating in this vibrant new arena for historical expression. He urged us neither by default or nor through our absence to leave the digital medium to others. He encouraged us to organize ourselves and make our interpretations, our voices, our contributions felt.

We will miss this voice of reason and ambition for our discipline. I will miss the guidance he gave to us all about the latest technologies, about their meaning for our work, and the coming changes in communication. But most of all I will miss his inspiration--his vision that the stories of the past might best be told in the technology of the future.

Roy Rosenzweig: A Selected Bibliography

Roy Rosenzweig, "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past" The Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (June, 2006): 117-46.

Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia" University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Roy Rosenzweig, "Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely" The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2005 Volume 51, Issue 42, Page B20.

Roy Rosenzweig, "Should Historical Scholarship Be Free?" AHA Perspectives (April 2005).

Roy Rosenzweig, "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era" The American Historical Review 108, 3 (June 2003): 735-762.

Roy Rosenzweig, "The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web" The Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (September 2001): 548-579.

Roy Rosenzweig, "Crashing the System? Hypertext and Scholarship on American Culture" American Quarterly 51, no. 2 (June 1999): 237-246.

Roy Rosenzweig, "Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors & Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet" The American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1530-52.

Michael O'Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, "Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web" The Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (June 1997).

Andrew McMichael, Roy Rosenzweig, and Michael O'Malley, "Historians and the Web: A Beginner's Guide" AHA Perspectives (January 1996).

Roy Rosenzweig, "'So, What's Next for Clio?' CD-ROM and Historians" The Journal of American History 81, no. 4 (March 1995): 1621-1640.

Department of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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