Jerome W. Crowder - Anthropological Data in the Digital Age: New Possibilities – New Challenges

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Richard Bruce Freeman (19592017)

We dedicate this volume to Richard, a friend and colleague, who passed away unexpectedly in October of 2017. At the time Richard was the chief editor of this book project, spearheading its development and molding its direction. Richard has been involved with the Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) for at least two decades and was recently elected to serve on the board beginning at the end of the 2017 meeting. While a graduate student at Temple University, Richard started the Graduate Association of Visual Anthropologists (GAVA) and continued to advise students in that organization that he would meet through SVA. Richard was an avid photographer and excellent visual researcher; his work was published in Visual Anthropology Review and also notably in the volume Viewpoints (2009), edited by Mary Strong and Laena Wilder.

Trained as both a photographer and an anthropologist, Richard returned to school and became a librarian, finding a means for combining his passion for anthropology, research, media practice, and technology. Since 2012 Richard was employed at the University of Florida (UF) as an Assistant University Librarian and the Anthropology Subject Specialist in the George A. Smathers Libraries. There Richard was a trusted and caring colleague. He was always smiling and very friendly with new colleagues, making sure they felt comfortable and welcome. Richard served as a valuable mentor to staff and worked to support his faculty colleagues with his activities in the United Faculty of Florida union. Richard was a very personable professional who left a lasting, positive impact at UF Libraries.

As an Anthropology Subject Specialist, he was able to lend his skills and talents to projects in Oaxaca (with Bill Wood) as well as in Haiti and Miami (with Ben Hebblethwaite). Richard was very interested in the role of archiving big data for social science and humanities research, and had recently uploaded his data on Vodou in Haiti and Miami to the Digital Library of the Caribbean, a multi-institution self-upload collection which he eagerly promoted as an example of the future of digital research ( http://ufdc.ufl.edu/dloc1?n=dloc ). Richard chaired panels and roundtables and offered workshops on this topic at national meetings as well as at the University of Florida. In 2016 he convened a panel on Organize This! Data management for anthropology in the digital age, preserving our evidence for future discovery from which this volume was born.

Richard loved to travel and explore, meet people, and listen to music. We could always count on Richard for good conversation on many different topics ranging from his beloved Cubs, anthropology and digital scholarship, photography and camera gear, and his curious and eclectic taste in music from around the globe. His website best reflects Richards enthusiastic approach to life, his interests, and his friends ( www.visualquotations.com ).