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Award Recognizes "Digital Democratizer" of History News Release Date: May 13, 2003
Research Triangle Park, N.C.—A historian with a commitment to opening the past to a broader audience has received the second Richard W. Lyman Award, presented by the National Humanities Center to recognize the innovative use of information technology in humanistic scholarship and teaching. Roy Rosenzweig, College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Center on History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, accepted the award during a ceremony at the Library of Congress on May 13. The Lyman Award carries a prize of $25,000. First presented in 2002, it honors Richard W. Lyman, who was president of Stanford University from 1970-80 and of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1980-88, and is made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. "The Lyman Award continues to recognize scholarly achievement of unusual merit and impact," said James J. O'Donnell, Georgetown University provost and chair of the Lyman Award selection committee. "Roy Rosenzweig's work creatively uses new tools to reach broader audiences and to affect those audiences more deeply. In so doing, he sets an example for historians and for scholars more generally of critical engagement and effective communication." A graduate of Columbia College who studied at St. John's College of Cambridge, England, and received the Ph.D. from Harvard University, Rosenzweig is co-author, with Elizabeth Blackmar, of The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1992), which won several awards including the 1993 Historic Preservation Book Award and the 1993 Urban History Association Prize for Best Book on North American Urban History. He also co-authored, with David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). His other books include Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 1983). With J.C. Agnew, he co-edited A Companion to Post-1945 America (Oxford, Blackwell, 2002). Rosenzweig first incorporated information technology into his work in the early 1980s, when he used databases to organize an oral history project. His digital involvement escalated in the early 1990s, when he, along with his colleagues Steven Brier and Joshua Brown, collaborated with the Voyager Company on the CD-ROM Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914. Beginning life as a textbook, the CD-ROM Who Built America? became a finalist in the first Interactive Media Festival and won the James Harvey Robinson Prize of the American Historical Association for an "outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history." As director of CHNM (chnm.gmu.edu), Rosenzweig now oversees a diverse collection of digital archives, guides for teachers of American and world history, on-line magazines, and digital tools for historians. "Roy Rosenzweig has helped historians understand how new developments in information technology transform the ways that they research, write, present, and teach about the past," according to Peter Bardaglio, provost and vice president for academic affairs and professor of history at Ithaca College. Bardaglio was a fellow of the National Humanities Center in 1999-2000 and is a member of the Lyman Award selection committee. "CHNM has been at the forefront of producing historical works in new media, testing the effectiveness of these products in the classroom, and reflecting critically on the promises and pitfalls of new media in historical practice." The principle behind CHNM's eclectic collection of projects, Rosenzweig says, is the same one that first led him into historical work and then digital projects—an effort to democratize history. "By democratizing history, I mean democratizing the audience—reaching wide and diverse audiences; democratizing the content-incorporating diverse voices, especially the voices of ordinary people; and democratizing the practice—making history open and collaborative," Rosenzweig explains. "I think that all of our projects, whether scholarly, pedagogical, or popular, are intended—broadly—to serve this end." One CHNM project that registers thousands of voices is the September 11 Digital Archive (911digitalarchive.org/). The archive, a digital complement to the National Museum of American History's commemorative exhibition "September 11: Bearing Witness to History," contains more than 130,000 digital objects, including 15,000 personal stories of 9/11. "The fundamental goal there is to explore whether and how history can be 'collected' on-line, whether and how the Internet can be a tool for historians who want to capture recent history more readily and easily than through oral history," Rosenzweig says. "It is likely the most significant and successful effort to gather history on-line as well as a collection of major importance on 9/11." In conceiving CHNM projects, many of which involve the World Wide Web, CD-ROM, and print components, Rosenzweig calls himself a pragmatist with a bias. "The decisions are most heavily shaped by what I think will work at a particular moment in time," he explains. "That being said, my bias over the past several years has been toward, first, the Web, and second, toward the free, the open, and the nonproprietary. I'm not a purist on this, but almost all of our projects are directed at the open sharing of information and our work in recent years has largely been in Open Source projects." To date, the primary benefit of applying information technology to his teaching and scholarship has been "the ability to do more," Rosenzweig says. "Reach more people, bring students in contact with more primary sources, bring more kinds of sources—images, sounds, etc.—in front of our audiences, provide more evidentiary support for our arguments. But it could also be that at some level the quantitative gains become qualitative and we begin to do something fundamentally different." This fundamental difference might well lie in the way digital work pushes scholars to work together. Rosenzweig notes that on many of the CHNM projects historians collaborate both as scholars and as programmers. "Humanists have traditionally worked alone but that isn't possible in new media—or at least it hasn't been very possible so far," he claims. "That means that digital work requires us to rethink the fundamental way we have worked in history and related fields." The National Humanities Center (nationalhumanitiescenter.org) is the nation's only private, independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. Since 1978, nearly 900 scholars from across the United States and around the world have researched and written more than 850 books during fellowships at the Center's Research Triangle Park facility. The Center also sponsors award-winning programs through which leading scholars work with high school and college teachers to improve teaching in the nation's schools and colleges, and holds conferences, seminars, and other public programs to raise and explore basic issues affecting human beings and their societies.
National Humanities Center 7 Alexander Drive, P.O. Box 12256 Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709 Phone: (919) 549-0661 Fax: (919) 990-8535 Comments and questions, contact: lmorgan@ga.unc.edu Revised: May 2003 nationalhumanitiescenter.org |
