The Art of a Book

My French class this semester is about literature and 19th century childhood in France. As a project, each of us is writing, illustrating, and binding a children's book!

This past Tuesday, we spent some time in Wellesley's Book Arts Lab (yes, this exists!) to learn about how we're going to bind our books and to study different types of printing.

 We're going to accordion fold our books, so we talked about how to format the documents we type, and then we started talking about binding. Our books will be accordion folded. Using an accordion fold allows the book to be read like a normal book, but it also allows us to pull out the pages so that they can all be seen at once. We'll all have multiple sheets that will need to be attached, and that's done with a type of Japanese tissue paper that has the right kinds of strength and durability. We practiced folding and attaching sheets using colorful pieces of paper! We also got to use some really interesting tools, like bone folders.

A yellow sheet and a pink sheet attached with a strip of tissue paper. That little bag is basically a paperweight, but evidently it's standard in book binding. The bone folder is to the left of the scissors.

We talked about different types of printing and looked at some examples of each, but the best part of our trip to the Book Arts Lab was printing a poster on a press! One of the first works we read was Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile, in which Rousseau repeatedly manipulates his student so that the student will learn, so we chose to print "Keep calm and manipulate Emile" on our poster.
This phrase has five Es in it, which is a lot for something like this where the font should be large. This was one of the only large types that had five Es. Each letter is called a sort, and with most of the other types, we would have been out of sorts. (That's the origin of that phrase!)

The inked type for our poster!

The press we were using was a 20th century press, so it had one motorized part. This was a really fascinating machine, and it was so much fun to figure out how various bits of it work!

All photos are by Becca, who has been awesome in working with us on this project. In the picture is Katherine, who runs the Book Arts Lab.

Mittens to Oliners: Choosing Olin

Olin admissions decisions come out this week!
We have nicknames (of varying popularity) for the different stages of the admissions process. Students start out as prospies, short for prospective students, which isn't a very Olin specific term. People who come to Candidates' Weekend are candidates, or candies. After that, some candidates become admitted students, also known as mittens. People who choose to come become Oliners.

I've been thinking back to two years ago when I was a mitten, so here's a list of a few factors to consider when making the decision to come (or not) to Olin. Some of these are based on what I took into consideration when making my decision, and some of them are related to what I've observed since coming to Olin.

Changing the Curriculum

Next year, Olin is changing the first year curriculum. (Again.)

For the past few years, there have been two semesters of circuits classes. Modeling and Control, or ModCon, is in the fall, and Real World Measurements, or RWM, is in the spring. They're each 3 credits, though 4 credits per class is standard at Olin. RWM in something like its current form was first run in spring 2010, so this is its fifth year. It's also its last.

This week was Course Fair, which means that we all got to see the probable list of fall classes (and a really tentative list of spring classes). There had been rumors going around about changes to the first year curriculum, and the course booklet confirmed them. Next year, the first years will only take a circuits class in the fall, not the spring, and it will be 4 credits. Why the change? Well, RWM has been successful, but a lot of people find ModCon pretty frustrating. It's not really a circuits class; the point isn't to learn how to analyze circuits, and everything in lecture is pretty abstract. The content really is about modeling and control, but a lot of students don't come away with a good understanding of control. What students do learn, though, is how to build a circuit neatly and how to debug. The other issue has been that neither RWM or ModCon has really been a 3 credit class. They took nowhere near 9 hours per week for the average Olin first year. There will be content cut in moving to a single 4 credit class, but the credit count will be more accurate, and maybe mixing ModCon and RWM will result in a course with the right amount of abstraction.

For now, the new class is being listed as "New Combined ModCon/RWM Course," so goodness only knows what anyone will call it. I also know nothing about how it will be structured. Will it have the half-semester RWM team project? How much of each current class will it cover? Where will the topics that are no longer covered in the first year curriculum end up?