Another semester is in the books and we have a few exciting developments to report:

First and foremost, the Center welcomes Dr. Jennifer Erickson as its new Assistant Director.  Jen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ball State.  You can read more about her here and here.  She is the author of Race-ing Fargo: Refugees, Citizenship, and the Transformation of Small Cities (Cornell University Press, 2020) and has been the lead in several projects focused on Muncie and Middletown.  Her work with the Center will include an ethnographic investigation of refugee resettlement and questions of racial difference in Muncie.  We’re excited to have her join us. Her appointment begins with the Summer, 2022 term.

We have also welcomed Muhammad Hafeez-ur-Rehman as the Center’s new Graduate Assistant and Managing Editor for Everyday Life in Middletown. Hafeez is pursuing his Ph.D. in Literature in BSU’s English Department.

The Center has received funding from the George and Frances Ball Foundation and from Ball State’s ADVANCE program for the first stages of the Deep Mapping Middletown project, a collaboration with Ball State’s Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts Lab and with scholars from IUPUI, Florida State, and the University of West Virginia (among others).  The goal is to create a “Deep Map” that employs the extensive data and archive tied to Middletown research to convey historical experience in spatial terms.  During the initial phase this summer we will gather a group of leading scholars from geography, anthropology, history, and digital humanities to develop a framework for the map. The result of this effort will provide the basis for applications to further fund and develop the project.

The Everyday Life in Middletown project continues.  We completed diary days on October 22, 2021, December 9, 2021 and April 4, 2022, giving us nearly 400 (397 to be exact) diaries and directives in our archive.  EDLM Co-Directors delivered a presentation on the experience of time during the pandemic to the Using Mass Observation’s Covid Collections Seminar (U.K./virtual), which we expect to be published as a journal article later this year. More on that soon.

The White Paper (March, 2022) from the Library Circulation Histories Workshop is available here. It evaluates the workshop, which gathered 25 scholars, librarians, and data scientists in April, 2021 to explore best practices in analyzing historical library circulation data, and summarizes its key findings. The results of the workshop will inform the forthcoming update of What Middletown Read.  The Center has begun collaborating with Ball State University Libraries to expand and refine the WMR database and online interface.  The workshop received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.