About Rrchnm on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

RRCHNM Past, Present, and Future

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 10:16:40 +0000

The first time that I came across the name Roy Rosenzweig was in the textbook for a class titled simply, “Historiography.” The book discussed Rosenzweig’s 1983 book, Eight Hours for What We Will, as a key work in American labor history. Since Eight Hours is a history of workers in Worcester, Massachusetts, just thirty miles from where I grew up, I went to the library and checked out the book. As I read, I was captivated by how Rosenzweig had captured the lives and labors of working-class people.

Passing the Baton

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 10:00:24 +0000

At the 2001 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Roy Rosenzweig dumped a cup of coffee on me. He didn’t mean to, of course, but he did.

It happened in the days when search committees often interviewed job candidates in hotel rooms and I was there to interview for a job at George Mason University. Roy and I had spoken on the phone about the position prior to my interview and, not knowing Roy, I’d been a bit intimidated during that call. I had read several of his books and articles in graduate school and he was the guy when it came to digital history.

New Directions at RRCHNM

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 14:40:15 +0000

Fifteen years ago a team of faculty, students, and developers here at RRCHNM began an ambitious new project. They wanted to create a browser plug-in that would allow users to capture and save things they were looking at online, but not just as a simple save of those items. They wanted to capture the metadata associated with those pages, images, datasets, .pdf files, and everything else the user was looking at, and to save it in ways that were searchable, shareable, and would allow all that data to be organized for research, writing, and teaching. In short, they wanted to kill the 3x5 card that had been the ubiquitous tool of scholars and students in the humanities (and lots of other disciplines) for decades. The result was Zotero, possibly the most successful piece of open source software ever to come out of a humanities center.