The Library Circulation Histories Workshop (April 19-30, 2021) took place in virtual asynchronous form. Building on the success of the What Middletown Read project, it drew together scholars from several countries to explore ways to make historic library circulation data more accessible and more analytically powerful. Over a growing number of projects have provided scholars…
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Michael Burayidi, Professor of Urban Planning, worked with the DSL and with Angie Gibson of University Libraries GIS Research and Map Collection to produce The Dark Store Theory and Big Box Stores, a visualization of urban property tax revenues, to demonstrate the inefficiencies associated with low-density land use (such as big box stores surrounded by…
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Everyday Life in Middletown (EDLM) is an ongoing collaboration between Ball State and citizens of Muncie, Indiana, to record, represent, and discuss everyday life in our city. Volunteers keep detailed diaries of their daily activities, which become part of our online archive. These diaries reveal countless details of everyday life that would otherwise go unrecorded.…
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The Cody Studies digital research platform provides a venue that allows scholars from a variety of backgrounds to explore William F. Cody’s life and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as an exemplary piece of Americana during an age of high nationalism. As an area of scholarly inquiry, this initiative aims to create a new genre of…
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Virtual Middletown is a three-dimensional environment that allows users to experience and investigate the socially transformative impact of large-scale industrialization between 1890 and 1925. It employs 3D gaming software to reproduce a series of real-life historical settings and uses them as spaces for interactive experiences comparable to those available in living history museums. The project affords users with immediate,…
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BSU’s IDIA Lab is premiering Virtual Companion – their custom augmented reality app employing LocusEngine, a geolocative process developed by IDIA Lab. Visitors to the park use the app to aid in learning and discovery while exploring the park’s Adena-Hopewell mounds. Using GPS data, the user’s position is geolocated in reference to the historical sites,…
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Virtual Buffalo Bill’s Wild West a multiplayer virtual world that simulates Buffalo Bill Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders, a traveling exhibition that presented authentic reenactments of frontier life in the American west to audiences around the world. This digital project is based upon the records of the Wild West’s 1899 performance in Muncie, Indiana and provides users…
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Changing Gears is a feature-length documentary film about the 2009 closing of Muncie’s BorgWarner’s auto parts plant, the last piece of the century-old Warner Gear company founded in the city in 1901. A bookend to the original Middletown research on the impact of industrialization, the film explores the meaning and significance of deindustrialization by examining the experiences of the…
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IDIA Lab has designed a virtual simulation of the villa of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site located outside of Rome in Tivoli, Italy. This project has been produced in collaboration with the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory (VWHL) at Indiana University (IU), directed by Dr. Bernard Frischer and funded by…
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The What Middletown Read Project reproduces in digital form the extant circulation records of the Muncie Indiana, Public Library, between 1891 and 1902. Using these resources, scholars have been able to explore reading choices and library usage in this quintessentially American city at a moment of profound social and economic change. The data came to…
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