Caleb Smith

Colleague and friend

I got to know James about three years ago when he became the Director of the Visual Media Center. He was such a large presence in this place and in all of our lives, and in his time as Director, he really transformed this place into a challenging, engaging, and truly fun place to work. He was an accomplished administrator, we all felt secure and confident in his leadership, and he was successful in just about every enterprise he set out to do. He led the transition from the Luna database to ARTstor, and greatly increased the robustness of all of our websites. He established important collaborations with various agencies to secure funding to lead fieldwork expeditions around the world. He played a leading role in Professor Stephen Murray’s Mapping Gothic France projects. His collaborative ventures reached across the campus and across institutions. He was simultaneously a scholar and a technician; I’ve never met anyone who embodied that often overused title “educational technologist” as well as him.

As a boss, he was loyal, protective, kind, and fair, we always knew we were in good hands; he was on our side. But most importantly, in just a few years, James changed the culture of the Visual Media Center by encouraging all of us to expand our approach to our jobs; whatever we were interested in doing, whether it was web design, field photography, writing content for a web page, or contributing our own skills and interests to a project, James always supported us, and enthusiastically encouraged us to learn, to maximize our interest and participation. Through James’ incredible knowledge, skill, guidance and support, all of our skills, abilities and experience grew dramatically over the last three years. He showed us, by his example, how to take a more expansive approach to any project. He was an inspiration.

Things have been pretty quiet around here without him. His great booming voice filled our offices, often with some exuberant or passionate statement about work, or basketball, or politics, or film, or some amusing anecdote. James was hilarious. When I think back on his funniest moments, I realize that they are mostly too shockingly inappropriate to repeat in a forum such as this, but suffice to say, he always kept our crew entertained.

Then there was music; James adored music, which was a major source of bonding between us. I remember coming in many mornings to find James working in the room next to my office, uploading images to the server, and playing his music VERY LOUDLY, first thing in the morning; invariably it was some obscure genre that he was exploring that month like "swamp klezmer" or "chutney punk". He would periodically shout I LOVE THIS SONG to us from the next room. Once, professor Zoey Strother needed to play a particular James Brown song as contextual material for her African art class, and she told me that she was having trouble finding it. I informed her that we had a professor of "funkology" in residence, and sent her to talk to James. James was delighted with Prof. Strother’s query, and, just like most things of this sort, he took her request very seriously. That night in his apartment, he spent hours listening to every James Brown album he owned (and he owned quite a lot of them) as he cooked up a big batch of chili, until he finally found the obscure track that professor Strother was looking for. That night, James achieved a perfect synchronism between work and life: doing research for a professor, while simultaneously doing two of his favorite tasks: cooking spicy food and listening to funky music. But in a larger sense, this wonderful mix of work and play, labor and diversion, was a more common experience for James than for most of us, I think. I've never met anyone who worked harder; one could say he was almost always working, but you could just as easily say he was always playing. Whether he was doing fieldwork, creating databases, working on websites, or creating any one of the myriad pedagogical resources that he created for the Department, James loved what he did, he was passionate about it. He came as close as anyone I've known to achieving a seamless relationship between work life and life work.

I really can't express how lucky I feel to have had James as a friend and colleague; he enriched my life in so many ways, and I truly miss him

Caleb and James at their colleague Pilar's wedding, July 2008