While the testing of beacon technology continues at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD), several groups of OSU students have been mobilized to begin collecting information about the history of Joseph Sullivant, Sullivant Hall, and its former and current occupants. Approximately 25 undergraduate from across the university who are enrolled in “The Ohio State University: Its History and Its World” (team taught by OSU Archivist Tamar Chute, History Professor David Staley, and English Professor Christian Zacher) will be combing the archives and other repositories for reports, articles, memoirs, photographs or other artifacts that relate to Sullivant Hall’s past as they learn the ins and outs of archival research and historical interpretation. In addition to this group, several graduate students in courses taught in the Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy and the Department of Dance have been deployed to look broadly for stories including oral histories that can be shared by persons with associations with the building and its former or current occupants. Stories for the project will also be sought through the analysis of material culture– artifacts, objects and physical attributes of the built environment– that provides evidence of the past.
Professor Maria Palazzi and Matthew Lewis visited the various classes to present the project and its background and rationale to each student group during the month of January. They also conveyed the structure that has been developed to collect data so that each new piece of information can be added to and the searchable expandable database that has been created. As students start to populate and submit the forms containing their findings, the work of assessing, comparing, relating and building the narratives that will become the stories we will communicate using locative technology can begin, making the next couple of months an incredibly exciting new phase for the project.