Eva Dale 0:00 From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now. David Staley 0:32 I'm pleased to be joined today in the studio with the team that is produced the book "Time and Change: 150 Years of the Ohio State University", a book that celebrates our sesquicentennial. That team is Tamar Chute, the University Archivist and Head of Archives, Tony Sanfilippo, Director of The Ohio State University Press, and Paul Nini, Professor in the Department of Design. Welcome colleagues, to Voices. Tamar Chute, Tony SanFilippo, Paul Nini 0:58 Thank you for having us. Thank you. David Staley 0:59 So first of all, tell us about the book. When someone purchases, when someone looks at this, tell us what they're going to find in the book. Tamar Chute 1:05 Wow. So I think one of the most important things is it's not the history, and it's not the present, it's a combination of the two. So looking at how campus has changed over time, but not in a chronological way, really more thematic, there are things I hope that every single person who looks at the book will recognize somehow, either from their time at Ohio State or if they're currently here, there will be aspects of it that they can appreciate, regardless of the time period. David Staley 1:34 So give us an example what sorts of things that we're going to find in the book. Tamar Chute 1:37 Well, so one section is completely land and physical campus. So there's a lot of pictures of the oval and Mirror Lake and buildings that no longer exists like the armory, but also brand new buildings like the art pack. And then there's a section say on student life where you would get everything from the cane rush, which is a very old tradition that no longer exists to homecoming and fans and things like that. So it's a combination of different activities. David Staley 2:03 And this is organized in what way, or is it disorganized in some way? Tony SanFilippo 2:08 It's thematic, it's primarily looking at some major aspects of the university. As Tamar said, there's a student life section, there's a section on academics and research, there's a section on athletics. Because of the Moral Act, a lot of states of course, had their anniversary or about to have their anniversary. And when we looked around at what other universities were doing to celebrate one thing we decided we wanted to do a little bit differently, was really make a more visual book, rather than just a history, we were actually published a history with the previous archivist. So there wasn't a lot of need for updating that that books only 1015 years old. So we really wanted something different to celebrate the university. And something that was quite beautiful. The images that we had to look at in the archive, ran the range of you know, very mundane, boring pictures to some were just absolutely stunning, and in their own ways tell history through sort of images. David Staley 3:06 So I wanted to raise that question, but to be clear for the audience, that was Tony, that was just talking there a minute ago. So tell me about the genesis of this project. I mean, obviously, it's the sesquicentennial, and you gave some sort of sense, why this project and how this project come to be. Tamar Chute 3:22 So the project really started a couple of years before we got in touch with the University Press to think about how we can even put this together. We had explored other campuses, books that were photographic histories, looking at how other not only universities had done it, but other institutions, cities and libraries. And we really wanted to somehow highlight the approximately 2 million photographs that we have at the university archives. But that being said, we didn't just want to make it the older photos. We wanted to bring in the current photographers, and have some of their images as well. So that's kind of where we started. How do we do this in a beautiful way that showcases the archives, but also current campus and combine those two together? David Staley 4:09 Tell me about the role that you and design students played in the production of this book. Paul Nini 4:13 Sure. So we were brought in once the content was more or less finalized. At that point, our job was to come up with the format and then once the format was approved to then lay out all those 300 and some pages into the final form that you see in the printed document. David Staley 4:31 And tell us about that process for those that aren't designers. Paul Nini 4:34 Yeah, so I let it with a group of six students in design all who graduated back in spring from our visual communication design. So these are undergraduates, these are undergraduate all fourth year students. And you know, they worked with me to sort of develop the format to get that approved. And then once we have that, we did a lot of sample layouts of what different page types were going to look like section openers frontmatter or backmatter, et cetera, et cetera, typical imagery pages, that sort of thing. And then once that was all approved, that actually had to go to President Drake's office for approval as part of the process. And once we had sort of the approvals with everything, then we were actually able to start building all the pages. David Staley 5:15 And I understand this is an auditory medium, can you paint for us in words what like a page might look like are the sorts of design decisions you were making there? Paul Nini 5:23 Sure. It would depend on the page type, of course, but most of the pages in the book are devoted to imagery. So like a section opener will have a large title, it will have a very large image that goes over two pages or a spread, as we call that. And then you will get into image pages where there's maybe two or three images over two pages each have a small caption, that sort of thing. There's introductory text at the beginning of each section as well, to kind of introduce what the point of the section is that sort of thing. David Staley 5:52 So tomorrow, you said 2 million or so images? Tamar Chute 5:56 Yes, although who's counting? David Staley 5:57 Yes. And how many images to actually make the book? Tamar Chute 6:01 I think we ended up, looking at Tony here, 327? Does that sound right? Tony SanFilippo 6:06 Yeah, yeah. David Staley 6:07 So tell me about that decision making process? How do you go from 2 million potential images to just 300 and some? Tamar Chute 6:13 So we figured out what themes we wanted. And then we looked through the archives for each theme, and pulled on just like our group computer drive images, copied them over both from things that we had digitized already. But also looking through the photo stacks where we have our physical photos. And before we scanned the ones we didn't know if we were going to use we just used photocopies, once we get sort of created this big grouping per section, we created thumbnail prints, we printed all the photos we had chosen for a particular section with thumbnails. And we laid them out on a conference table. Oh, to look at it's actually a very physical because it does. Yeah, exactly. And so we looked at, oh, these two images are very similar. This one's better. We pitched the other one. And then we narrowed it down to something more manageable. But it also gave us a chance to think about, it'd be great if we could get a similar picture of today that matches this old historic photo. And then we went to the University photographers and said, Okay, this is kind of what we're looking for, do you have anything that would work? So it was a combination of looking at digital images more recent digging through to find, for instance, commencement, trying to find commencement photos that are different from one to another is actually really challenging? Because over time, they're still in black and white, you know, like, everyone's in black robes. And how do you make it visually interesting to talk about commencement, but sort of that combination? So it was very much a physical, like looking at photos, pitching ones we didn't like. David Staley 7:54 You talk about, you know, here's a picture from the past, here's a picture from the present. Were you making other kinds of juxtapositions like this sort of image selections? In other words, we get to a page, are we going to see interesting sorts of juxtapositions of images? Tony SanFilippo 8:07 Yeah, I think so. And the other thing, of course, that we had in mind was we wanted it to have something of a narrative as well. So, you know, it's not just how the two images on a page are relating to each other, but how they related to the images that came before and the images that are going to come after. So there were quite a few factors in choosing the various images. There are a lot of books out there that are sort of then in now books, which, you know, they'll take a picture in the same place 50 years later. And there's some of that in this book, but that wasn't really the focus. It was much more I think about the experience and juxtaposing experiences. David Staley 8:41 Tell us about something, one of these narratives, what might that look like what we be experiencing in this book? Tony SanFilippo 8:46 Well, student life is a good example. It starts for example, with emptying the cars getting dropped off at school, it goes into, you know, those first heavy weeks and, and some of the celebrations and traditions that are involved there, all the way through to things like commencement. So you know, classroom, various group participation, those sorts of things. David Staley 9:04 Paul, is this the sort of project you frequently do with students? So was this a one off experience, or is this something that department design does? Paul Nini 9:11 Well, we frequently do projects with students, yes. This was a pretty unique project, though, because of project like this doesn't come along very often. But yeah, we're more often putting together student teams to work on things for nonprofit organizations, because we've got a history of doing that for a number of years in our department. And a lot of the nonprofits in the area sort of know that we do that. So they kind of come to us over summer and fall to sort of get on the docket so that if we're going to put a team together, we can figure out how to do that. What sorts of other projects like this. Recently, we've done some things for the Clintonville beach World Resource Center, which is a you know, a place that sort of helps people who are on hard times in the area we been involved with, sort of refreshing their brand identity we were also involved the redid their food pantry so we got our interior design students involved with that. And they build out a new space within that building, various other things. We do a lot of these over the years. David Staley 10:06 So the students who came to this project, they were all prepped, they were ready to do this. So was there any sort of extra training that they that they needed before they could jump in? Paul Nini 10:13 No extra training, really, they were in their fourth year, they've already gone through three years of our program. They knew what they were doing. It was really just a question of guiding them to sort of go through the process that we established to do this project. David Staley 10:26 Pretty significant internships, it sounds like? Paul Nini 10:29 Oh yeah, they do a lot of internships as well. Most of them start out working somewhere at an office in the university, especially from Visual Communication Design, because there's a need for student designers to work around the university. And then in their third and fourth years, they often go out to the community and work say, with a design firm here in town, or with one of the in house design areas of a large company like Chase or something like that. David Staley 10:53 And Tamar, the way that you were talking about for it sounds like you were working with a team as well. You said we were making decisions, tell us who was on your team? Tamar Chute 11:00 Sure. So nobody at the Archives does everything by themselves. It just doesn't work that way. We were lucky enough to be able to we were given funding thankfully from the president's office to hire an archives assistant for the sesquicentennial Tyler Osborne, and she was amazing. She actually rescanned every single photograph, because for a book this size, you need the images to be scanned at 1200 dpi, which if you think about a normal photo, it's more along the lines of 300. So every single one had to be rescanned. But she also found images that I've talked about, I'm just kind of joking about commencement, but she found different ones. So you know, I had done the initial sort. And then we realized we really need a few more commencement. So she did a lot of digging for us. But we also have an incredible team of archivists that work at the Archives who have done the work of collecting all these images over time. So current people that work for us, but also previous staff and archivists, and then students. So Tyler directed the scanning, but we also had a team of students, because if you have 300 plus photos, you can't just have one person do all the work. So it really is a team effort. So yes, my name is on the book. But I could not have done this at all without not just the two individuals here, but a whole team of people with archives for all their work. I'm incredibly grateful. Eva Dale 12:22 Did you know that 23 programs in the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences are nationally ranked as top 25 programs with more than 10 of them in the top 10? That's why we say the College of Arts and Sciences is the intellectual and academic core of the Ohio State University. Learn more about the College at artsandsciences.osu.edu. David Staley 12:47 Well, Tony, I mean, obviously, the press is involved in this project, they're the ones publishing it, but you sound like you took a very active role in building this book, is that typical for how you produce a book? Tony SanFilippo 12:58 Traditionally, university presses are known for the scholarship that they publish. But most university presses particularly at state institutions also do books that are sort of service books, books that are really there to talk about the university in its history, the surrounding community, the state, we didn't have a regional program when I came here, but I felt it's one of the ways that the university can give back to the community. When you say regional programs, what do you mean by that? So books about Columbus books about the people of Ohio, the history of Ohio, etc. So the Trillium imprint is really dedicated to that we do all sorts of books that are Ohio focused, and I do most of the book development and acquisitions, I find the books for that particular part of the list. And in fact, that was one way that Tamara and I first met, was that imprint has a very different editorial board than our traditional faculty editorial board, because we really wanted people who had specialization in the history of both the university in the state as well as a good sense of books that have already been done. So they would be redundant, or books that really needed to be done. Tomorrow actually serves on that editorial board that helps us decide which books to publish. David Staley 14:11 Tell us about the scholarly work of the press when you're not publishing Trillium books or regional books. Tell us about the other books of the press. Tamar Chute, Tony SanFilippo, Paul Nini 14:12 Sure, well we do about 60 books a year, of those books, about 30 to 40 are going to be scholarly books. And what they are, are books of generally humanities and social sciences. You know, a long time ago it was recognized that scholarship, while it's good for it to be in the market, the market doesn't really financially support it. And University stepped up and said this scholarship and research is important. It's important that it be published, disseminated sent out through the world, we realize that it has limited audience and not real commercial liability. So university presses were set up we were set up around the beginning of the 20th century at Ohio State. And initially the press literally was a press we printed things is. And oftentimes that would be research done by the University. Sometimes it would be simple things like multiple copies of a test. And it did the newspaper for a little while. It got out of the printing itself business and into being an independent imprint that publishes scholarship alone. That happened in about 1920s. And after that point, the university press began publishing in specific areas where the faculty on campus were particularly well known. So that's changed over time. At this point, we primarily focus on literary studies, identity studies, comparative studies, that's really the majority of the publishing that we're doing. We do a little bit in rhetoric and in medieval and classical studies, but the idea is, these are books that need to be written to advance scholarship, they need to be published so that other scholars have access to them. But their books where the market doesn't really support that, so the university does it. David Staley 15:56 Well, and to be clear, you published not just simply Ohio State authors. Tamar Chute, Tony SanFilippo, Paul Nini 16:00 Absolutely. The idea is the university press is it's sort of an altruistic organization in that we're really benefiting particular areas of scholarship rather than individual scholars. So yes, we are hoping to publish the best literary scholars in the world and to a certain extent in the specific areas that we do like narratology and in comic studies, we are definitely doing the best scholars in the world in those fields. David Staley 16:24 And some of the other titles under the Trillium imprint in addition to "Time and Change", what else do we see on that imprint? Tamar Chute, Tony SanFilippo, Paul Nini 16:29 Well, we do all sorts of things. I had recently published a book that's a narrative of the Huron Wyandot people. And as many people know, the Wyandot people lived here in Ohio for many, many years, and were eventually chased out of Ohio. But that story is not well known, because there are very few Wyandots still here in Ohio. So one of the two surviving tribes, this one in Oklahoma approached us about this and said, because of Ohio is so much of our history, and we feel it's important to Ohio's history, would you consider publishing this book? And because there hadn't been as complete a history of the Huron Wyandot that in the past, it made perfect sense for us to do. But we do other things, too, we do lighter things, we did a collection of Joe Blundo's columns, for example. You know, it's not all very serious scholarship to a certain extent, it's books for the people of Ohio, and in some cases, that is to both entertain as well as educate the people. David Staley 17:25 Paul, I wonder, as part of your work, have you ever done book design or anything like this before? Paul Nini 17:30 It's been a few years, but yes, I have designed some books in the past, such as there was one that was done for Denison University and their art gallery that was a book about three Irish women artists who were on display at that time. And they had them all write essays, and we woven lots of imagery of their work and that sort of thing. And there's been a few others in the past. But no, it's not been a major part of my professional practice. I've done more brand identity design and things like that. But yeah, I've certainly done some books. David Staley 17:59 Give us an example of the kind of work that you typically do. Paul Nini 18:02 Yeah, years ago, if you'll remember the restaurant Rigsby's that was in the Short North, I did the original visual identity for that in 1985, I think, is when that was. David Staley 18:10 And when we say visual identity, that means...? Paul Nini 18:14 Well that would mean anything that visually portrays the organization in some way. So in their case, it was a word mark or logo type that was customized for them. Custom Colors, imagery, application of all that printed materials, environmental graphics, and signage and things like that. Really, whatever kind of item that needs to be designed and produced would be part of a brand identity system in some way. David Staley 18:38 Talking about the "Time and Change" book, who did you perceive the audience to be for this book? Who's reading this? Tamar Chute 18:45 Well... Tony SanFilippo 18:45 Every one. Tamar Chute 18:46 Yeah. I mean, for me, it was a chance to share it not just with people that are connected to Ohio State University, but really the community at large. I think you cannot live in Ohio, or particularly in Columbus and not have some sort of reaction to the university. Be that positive or negative, right, of course. But I feel like even if you are not an alum, you just casually come to events on campus, you might be interested in this, because just a chance to see where you've walked. And the people who have been walking down the same streets as you have. I think there's something that connects to it. I had lunch the other day with an archivist who works in town who doesn't work at Ohio State. And he said, I really want a copy of the book. I was like, Okay, great. Just at first watch. And he said, Well, where can I get it? So I was like, well, let's go across the street. So, you know, he didn't go to Ohio State. He's from Ohio originally. But he wanted a copy to just see something about how the university which is such a big part of his life, even though he doesn't work here or he didn't go here, but just because he lives in Columbus. He wanted to see how things have evolved, and just get a sense of A place that has been around for 150 years, which is, you know, in this country, there are a lot of places but then there's so much more that so much newer than that. David Staley 20:08 I don't know if this is tied to the book, but I know there's an exhibit in the library. Is this tied to the book, or is this something distinct from it? Tamar Chute 20:17 So it is distinct from it. The current exhibit in the library is called "Scarlet and Gray: The Student Experience". So there are images from the book in the gallery in Thompson library. But it's different, it's, of course, there's a lot of three dimensional objects there. With that exhibit, we're literally looking at how student experience has changed over time. We have a lot of different mannequins and clothing and a freshman beanie and things like that, that are more about how students have evolved. And then in the spring semester, we'll have another exhibit, we're actually calling it time and change, which is really looking at the university. Again, it's kind of a then in now, which is the book as Tony pointed out, isn't exactly then and now but that's what that second exhibit will be about. David Staley 21:03 Tamar Chute, Tony SanFilippo, Paul Nini. Thank you. Tamar Chute, Tony SanFilippo, Paul Nini 21:07 Thank you, David. Eva Dale 21:09 Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer, produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale. Transcribed by https://otter.ai