Tag: History

History

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Anthony-Northside Gateway Project

The Wheeling/Cowing monuments loaded on a flatbed for transport

PHOTO provided by the Anthony Northside Neighborhood Association

The stone gateway at the entrance to the Wheeling Park Addition at Wheeling/Cowing and another remaining stone boundary post on Wheeling are the last standing structures in Muncie born of the generosity of Harriett B. Anthony.

In April 2019 the Anthony-Northside Neighborhood Association (ANNA) discovered these monuments were in the path of the city’s planned reconstruction of Wheeling Avenue. A mad scramble was made to find the funding and resources to save the historic gates. With the help of numerous state and local organizations including Ball State’s College of Architecture and Planning, Indiana Landmarks, the Muncie Board of Works, and the Federal Highway Administration funds were eventually allocated for the Indiana Department of Transportation to remove the iconic brickwork and return them to their original locations once the Wheeling project completes.

Read the whole story and see more photos of the project on ANNA’s website!

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Spring 2020 Ball State Immersive Learning Projects

Ball State faculty, students, and community partners worked together this spring on a number of immersive learning projects in and around Muncie.

Academy of Model Aeronautics Video Project
Faculty Mentors: Tim Pollard, Department of Telecommunications; Suzanne Plesha, Office of Immersive Learning
Community Partner: Academy of Model Aeronautics

Assigning the Living Quality of Muncie Neighborhoods Using Remote Sensing and GIS
Faculty Mentor:  Jason Yang, Department of Geography
Community Partner:  Muncie Action Plan

Beneficence Records (ongoing)
Faculty Mentor:  Daniel Porter, Department of Music Media Production
Community Partner:  Indiana Public Radio

Capturing “The Big Idea”
Faculty Mentor: Melinda Messineo, Department of Sociology
Community Partner: Second Harvest Food Bank

Geospatial Design Laboratory
Faculty Mentor: Jörn Seemann, Department of Geography
Community Partner: Muncie Visitors Bureau

Halteman Park Landscape Architecture Studio Project
Faculty Mentors:  Chris Baas, Jeremy Merrill, J.P. Hall; Department of Landscape Architecture
Community Partners:  Halteman Village Neighborhood Association, City of Muncie, Muncie Parks Department

Human Rights Symposium
Faculty Mentor: Ruby Cain, Department of Educational Studies
Community Partners: City of Muncie Human Rights Commission, Industry Neighborhood Association, Whitely Community Council, Muncie Public Library, Muncie Housing Authority, It Is Well With My Soul, DePaul University School of New Learning and Service Engagement Projects, Northeast Indiana Workers Project, Inc.

i-Made (Indiana Made) Muncie:  Custom Fabricated Design-through-Production (ongoing)
Faculty Mentor:  Kevin Klinger, Department of Architecture
Community Partners:  Indiana Hardwoods (IHLA), Midwest Metals, Minnetrista, Mobile Market

The Junior Producers Club
Faculty Mentor:  Christoph Thompson, School of Music
Community Partners:  Boys and Girls Club, Buley Community Center

Muncie Neighborhood Visual Identity Design (ongoing)
Faculty Mentor:  Shantanu Suman, School of Art
Community Partners:  Building Better Neighborhoods, Muncie Action Plan

Preserving the Past and Looking Toward the Future:  Historic Preservation and Digital Storytelling for a Muncie Landmark Church
Faculty Mentor:  Peggy Fisher, Department of Communication Studies
Community Partner:  St. Mary Catholic Church

Renovation of Residential Structures
Faculty Mentor: Janet Fick, Department of Construction Management and Interior Design
Community Partners: ecoREHAB, Urban Light, and Brothers 2 Brothers

Sustainable Muncie Project:  Assessing Sustainability for the City of Muncie
Faculty Mentor:  Sanglim Yoo, Department of Urban Planning
Community Partner: Muncie Action Plan

Teen Dating Violence
Faculty Mentor: Ron Dolon, Department of Social Work
Community Partner: A Better Way

Tourist Maps for Muncie and Delaware County
Faculty Mentor: Jörn Seemann, Department of Geography
Community Partner: Muncie Visitors Bureau

Urban Health in Muncie, IN:  Pb in the Soils (ongoing)
Faculty Mentors:  Carolyn Dowling, Department of Geological Sciences; Jessi Haeft, Department
of Natural Resources and Environment Management
Community Partner:  United Way of Delaware County

Well Connected 
Faculty Mentor:  Jane Ellery, School of Kinesiology
Community Partners:  Muncie Action Plan, Future of Work/Sustainable Muncie, George and Frances Ball Foundation

Working with the Whitely Community to Identify Needs and Resources of Men who are Reentering the Community After Periods of Incarceration
Faculty Mentor:  Keisha Warren-Gordon, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology
Community Partner:  Whitely Community Council

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Preserving the Past and Looking Toward the Future: Historic Preservation and Digital Storytelling for a Muncie Landmark Church

Churches play a significant role in the lives of Muncie residents, and every church has a story worth preserving. St. Mary Catholic Church located on West Jackson, held its first mass on December 8, 1930. Then, the parish had 100 families. Today, the church campus has grown and the  community is now made up of approximately 700 registered families. Although the parish has kept an extensive collection of historical records, photos, and other memorabilia dating back to the 1930s, many of their stories had gone untold. The goal of this year-long, immersive project was to assist St. Mary Church with a variety of storytelling initiatives. Students conducted interviews, filmed and produced a series of seven short videos covering topics such as the grounds, the stained-glass windows, and church architecture.  The students are also publishing a photo book that incorporates augmented reality so that the photos can tell stories of their own.

Faculty Mentor: Peggy Fisher
Department: Communication Studies
Community Partners: St. Mary Catholic Church
Students: Scott Anderson, Nathan Guide, Abigail Huff, Elli Mott, Zach Neitzel, Avonlea Schnitzius, Cameron Toner

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Serious Game Design with Minnetrista

Student working on game design at a laptop

Spring 2019: A multidisciplinary team of undergraduates has worked with Minnetrista to develop an original, interactive, educational video game about food preservation. We have tied our research and development process into Minnetrista’s revision of Oakhurst, the historic home where the original Ball Blue Book canning recipes were developed. The team worked together to create a game for families who visit the museum, to get them working together in an exciting simulation of canning.

Fall 2018: The students in this semester’s Honors Colloquium on Serious Game Design worked with Minnetrista to create original games that explore regional history, culture, and themes. The students began the semester by studying fundamentals of game design with an emphasis on transformative and educational games. This included a formal analysis of Minnetrista Fairy Trails, a game created by an immersive learning course in Spring 2018. In the second half of the semester, each student identified a particular theme to explore through iterative game design and produced the playable prototypes that are presented at the showcase. Between semesters, faculty and staff from Ball State and Minnetrista will evaluate what was learned this semester to choose a project for production in a Spring game software production studio course.

Spring 2019

Faculty Mentors: Paul Gestwicki
Departments: Computer Science
Community Partners: Minnetrista Cultural Center
Students: Jawad Al Mamoon, Lauren Binnewies, Chris Bucker, Gabrielle Hogan, Makayla Hughes, Nick Manis, Lindsey Murphy, Eli Sokeland, Tanner Stanley, Austin Tinkel, Hunter Wallace, Julie Xiao

Fall 2018

Faculty Mentors: Paul Gestwicki
Departments: Computer Science
Community Partners: Minnetrista Cultural Center
Students: Ryland Babusiak, Lexi Benakovich, Katie Grieze, Nathan Hahn, Zachary Hughes, Sarah Humphrey, Kyle Jones, Ariel Meece, Mathias Miles, Eve Miller, Alex Ross, Samantha Stapleton, Christopher Zurisk

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Riverside-Normal City: Portrait of a Middletown Neighborhood in a Post Industrial Age

This project conducted an ethnographic study of the Riverside Normal City (RNC) neighborhood, which is the area east of Ball State University in Muncie. Using participant observation, oral history, archival research, photography and semi-structured interviews, students provided an interdisciplinary analysis of how this neighborhood has changed over time. Students attended monthly RNC neighborhood meetings, interviewed neighborhood residents, scanned residents’ photos while collecting stories, reading about the history of Muncie and documenting the neighborhood today. In analyzing this data, students were asked to consider the economic, sociocultural, and political causes that changed this neighborhood overtime and how these changes have impacted local residents. The findings were published in a book.

Faculty Mentor: Jennifer Erickson
Department: Anthropology
Community Partner: Riverside-Normal City Neighborhood Association
Students: Iesha Alspaugh, Simran Bhinder, Abby Clark, Joseph Coachys, Alejandra Diaz-Fernandez, Barbara Dickensheets, Kathleen Harper, Amber Janzen, Savannah Myers, Mia Nickelson, Kathryn Powell, Alexis Smith, Bevin Snyder, Leslie Thomas

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Beech Grove Cemetery Book & Phone App – Fall 2015

Beech Grove Cemetery holds many wonderful stories about the people who came from Muncie and made contributions as state, national and international citizens.  Muncie’s Beech Grove Cemetery Board asked Ball State students to create a book to document these stories and to transfer that content into a walking tour that would allow visitors to access that information via smartphones.   Students gained experience in historical research, technical, and public writing.  The students were responsible for conducting research, identifying themes, designing interpretation, and selecting stories for the book and app.

Learn more from the project video: