DEEP MAPPING MIDDLETOWN

Deep Mapping Middletown is a collaboration among historians, geographers, librarians and designers. It will create a platform for data intensive, spatially-driven investigations of Muncie, Indiana, that employ techniques derived from literary study, history, anthropology, geography and art. Our ultimate aim is to produce a “detailed multimedia depiction of a place” that draws upon the extensive archive created by the century of social research focused on Muncie as a result of its role in Robert and Helen Lynd’s seminal Middletown studies and their many successors.

The project is in its early stages. In 2022, we brought together scholars, librarians and designers from around the world for a hybrid workshop focused on developing a plan for for creating intensive and complex representations of place. (The list of participants can be accessed here.) Our current goal is to secure funding that enables us to build foundational components for the project. For the most recent project activities, including on the ongoing Mapping Middletown Voices initiative, please visit the updates section.

Deep Mapping Middletown has received funding from the George and Frances Ball Foundation and the Sponsored Projects Administration, Ball State University, for the initial planning phase of the project. It is an undertaking of the Center for Middletown Studies, the Institute for Intermedia Arts Lab, and University Libraries at Ball State, and by the Geospatial Research Facility at Michigan Tech University, as well as spatial humanities scholars from several other institutions.

For more information contact jconnoll@bsu.edu.