Digital Archives Studio
Georgia Gallavin
Final Project Proposal
My project will center on option three: an examination of The New School’s branding and
institutional identity from its founding to present day and how its organizational
restructuring reflect the school’s evolving focus and priorities. The finished product will be
an interactive timeline that can serve as a portal into the archives through linking relevant
records.
Archivist Michelle Light lists contextual information such as history, administrative
structure, functions, relationships to other corporate bodies, leaders, staff, mission, and
major events or accomplishments as essential in understanding institutional records.1 The
scope of this project will focus on The New School’s history, administrative and
organizational structure, leaders, and mission over time through archival documents to
better understand how the school differentiates itself. Questions on the degree to which
divisional reorganization and renaming indicates a “real” change versus a reaction to trends
of the time will be explored.
Materials from the public relations department, weekly bulletins and course catalogues will
be utilized. The bulletins provide insight into issues that piqued the interest of The New
School community and include general announcements, which detail new divisions and
programs. Documents from the publicity department reveal the backstory of how The New
School represented its ideals to the outside world. Statements and correspondence from
decision makers of the time, including publicity director Agnes de Lima and past presidents
Alvin Johnson and Bryn Hovde, shed light on where the university placed itself within the
spectrum of higher education institutions. Although I have been unsuccessful in finding a
comprehensive graphic standards manual from the school’s early history, the analysis of
vocabulary, typography, and visual layout will supplement this examination of The New
School’s identity formation.
In 2009, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics published a compilation of opinions on
The New School’s history and identity on the occasion of its 90th anniversary. The guide
includes survey responses from New School faculty, staff, and students in order to “archive
a moment in time in The New School’s history.”2 Further research can be done through
Light, Michelle. “Moving Beyond the Name: Defining Corporate Entities to Support Provenance-Based
Access”Journal of Archival Organization 5:1/2 (2007): 53.
2 Vera List Center for Art and Politics, Parts & Labor Gallery. (2009). A Tiny Archive of Critical Viewpoints on
The New School.[booklet]. New York. 1.
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interviews to the organizers of the event, as well as any archival material that may exist on
the exhibition itself. The results of this survey, conducted in 2009 can also be contrasted
against past student surveys, available in the archives.
After discussing options with The New School archivists, the idea of using a timeline to put
these organizational changes in context and linking to the original archival sources seemed
a viable option to represent the material. I believe the timeline used by Collective Access is
an open source tool from knightlab of Northwestern University,
http://timeline.knightlab.com/, known as TimelineJS. The plug-in accommodates a variety
of technical skill sets: at its most basic, data can be plugged into a Google spreadsheet to be
converted into an interactive timeline. Further, quotes that reflect a new awareness of the
school’s identity or mission can be noted next to the document, rather than a simple
description of it. This timeline supports a number of different media, therefore, it is possible
to include other relevant visual or audio material as well. The timeline can stand-alone or
be incorporated into different sites as needed.
For my own organizational purposes as much as for those using the archives, I would like to
create a visualization of all the significant organizational changes at The New School. This
document can serve as the equivalent of a “cover letter” to the project overall and help to
better illustrate the history of each division today. Organizational restructuring, however,
does not have a static endpoint: the institution as it is today will undergo further
reorganization, and I hope to, somehow, represent this visually as well.
There is a need to clarify the progression of organizational changes within The New School
to better understand how these changes reflect the school’s institutional identity. A lack of
clarity about these changes, and the reason behind them, constitutes a sizable gap in
knowledge among The New School community. Mapping, visualizing, and contextualizing
these myriad changes to schools, divisions, and programs will illustrate what forces, both
from within and outside of the school, have shaped the core message, philosophy, and
overall outward facing persona of The New School.
There is a treasure trove of archival material that is available to researchers, and I hope that
this portal will draw many more users to the digital archives and create a greater
understanding of where The New School has been and, by extension, the possibilities of
where it is headed.
Bibliography (tentative)
"A Bad Move on a New Logo." Bloomberg BusinessWeek 30 Aug. 2005: n.
pag.http://www.businessweek.com. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.
Inefuku, Harrison. “Whatever Happened to Art and Design?: Using Archival Practice to
Manage the Impact of Academic Restructuring on Institutional Repositories.” Journal of
Library Administration 53, no.4 (May 2013):209-222. Library & Information Science Source,
EBSCOhost(accessed March 16, 2014).
Light, Michelle. “Moving Beyond the Name: Defining Corporate Entities to Support
Provenance-Based Access” Journal of Archival Organization 5:1/2 (2007): 49-74.
Rutkoff, Peter M., and William B. Scott. New School: A History of the New School for Social
Research. New York: Free, 1986. Print.
Thelin, John. “Archives and the Cure Institutional Amnesia: College and University Saga as
Part of the Campus Memory.” Journal of Archival Organization 7, no. 1/2 (January 2009): 415. Library & Information Science Source, EBSCOhost(accessed March 16, 2014).
Vera List Center for Art and Politics, Parts & Labor Gallery. (2009). A Tiny Archive of Critical
Viewpoints on The New School.[booklet]. New York.
YAKEL, ELIZABETH et al. (2008), “Institutional Repositories and the Institutional
Repository: College and University Archives and Special Collections in an Era of
Change”, The American Archivist, 71, 2.