This blog documents my trip to Oberlin College where I conducted research on Dr. Roger Wolcott Sperry's archives. The purpose of this project was to help organize some of Dr. Sperry’s archives and to strenghten a partnership between the Oberlin College archive staff and UNCW.

Oberlin College Campus

Psychology Building, Oberlin Campus

Mudd Center, Oberlin's Library

At noon, Mr. Grossi and I went to downtown Oberlin to eat lunch and further discuss Dr. Sperry's archives.

Dr. Sperry collected and published in a wide variety of books and journals (including some written in Chinese and French).

Here is a video of me speaking about the tasks I would complete on Dr. Sperry's archives.

The archive storage room where you can find a student file on almost every student that has attended Oberlin College.

Dr. Sperry's master’s thesis entitled “An action-current study of some elementary problems of movement coordination’ (1937).

Here are some illustrations of Dr. Sperry's expiriments as well as some slides he used on his split brain patients.

Here is a box of references where Dr. Sperry would keep brief notes on research articles he had read.

 At the heading of the index cards, Dr. Sperry would indicate the article title and researcher. Below he would include contextual information about the articles, such as research findings and questions he had regarding the results.

Studying Dr. Sperry’s box of references offered me a glimpse of what psychological research might have looked like in the 1930s.

After Dr. Sperry's children were born he began taking art classes such as pottery and sculpture. This is a photograph of one of his sculpture pieces.

This is a newspaper article about a basketball game in which Dr. Sperry scored some winning shots. He attended Oberlin under a scholarship for his atheletic contribution to the College--he was captain of the basketball team and played on the track, baseball and football teams.

Oberlin’s archiving staff is now in the final step of organizing Dr. Sperry’s materials. There remain eight boxes full of videos that they would like to convert to digital files (mp3). Unfortunately it costs about 200 dollars just to convert one film (there are multiple films in each box). The staff must therefore sort through and decide which ones are worth converting and whether or not they can afford it.

Mr. Grossi and I in the Mudd Center at Oberlin College.

Dr. Roger Wolcott Sperry

1913-1994