I’ve had my nose to the grindstone for the last week and swore off blog-reading to meet some important deadlines.
It was with great sadness that I learned that Roy Rosenzweig of the Center for History and New Media passed away last week after a long battle with cancer. For those of us with an interest in history and historical collections, the work of CHNM under Roy’s leadership was inspiring. While many “memory institutions” stood by refused to accept that the public increasingly recorded their lives in digital formats, Rosenzweig and CHNM pioneered techniques for gathering and collecting digital histories through projects like the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
As Matthew Kirschenbaum points out, Roy’s legacy will also be marked by fruits of his labor. CHNM has become an important cornerstone of the larger digital humanities community. Likewise his work such as Presence of the Past has highlighted the work that we do in museums, even when it was challenging us to think differently.
For a more recent example of a CHNM project (in conjunction with the Minnesota Historical Society) aimed at museums, check out the Omeka project. Currently in public beta, Omeka will provide small museums with a free and open source content management system. (more on Omeka via the Digital Campus podcast
Washington Times Obituary (via Boing Boing)
