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Anthony-Northside Neighborhood Living Quality

Student studying a thermal image on a cell phone

The goal of this project was to map the quality-of-life for Muncie neighborhoods, and specifically to map the living quality for the Anthony-Northside neighborhood using GIS and remote sensing techniques. Four general categories of living quality indicators were evaluated for each house in the neighborhood and fifteen maps were created in this project: one map for Home Insulation; two maps for Home value and Lot size; one map for Lot Greenness, ten maps for its adjacency to community amenities, and one Overall Living Quality Index map.

Home Insulation for each house was evaluated from a thermal infrared image collected by students using a FLIR One thermal camera. Home value and lot size were obtained from Zillow.com. Lot Greenness was assessed based the greenness percentage in each lot, which was derived from the USA NAIP NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) imagery. Proximity to community amenities including Clinics, Schools, Libraries, Restaurants, USPS Mailboxes, Bus Stops, Parks, Bike Trails, Recreations, and Fire Stations were analyzed using Network Analysis in ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online. The values of all indicators were scaled to categories of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest living quality and 5 being the highest. The Overall Living Quality Index was obtained by averaging all fourteen living quality indicators.

Explore some of the story maps created using the collected data.
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Faculty Mentor: Jason Yang
Department: Geography
Community Partner: Muncie Action Plan, Anthony-Northside Neighborhood Association
Course: Advance Remote Sensing – GEOG 437

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VIDEO: Sanglim Yoo: Discovering New Ways to Improve Cities

Working with the FDA’s Farmers Food Box program and Purdue Extension during the pandemic, CERES Affiliated Faculty Joshua Gruver, Associate Professor of Environment, Geology, and Natural Resources, is helping Hoosiers in need by providing free food sourced from Indiana diary producers. Dr. Gruver and the Muncie Food Hub have been taking milk that would have been dumped and giving it away for free. Watch Josh’s interview on Fox 59.

 

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VIDEO: Sanglim Yoo: Discovering New Ways to Improve Cities

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Ball State University Alumni magazine recapped the recent immersive learning work of CERES Affiliated Faculty Sanglim Yoo, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning.  Funded by Provost Immersive Learning grants, Dr. Yoo has led student teams in analyzing the potential of brownfields in Delaware and Grant Counties as sites for solar farms and in assessing and improving economic sustainability efforts in Muncie.  These projects also allow students to improve their skills in using socioeconomic and demographic data and the geographic information system (GIS) mapping tool.  Read more on the BSU Alumni Magazine’s website!

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Published Article: Voices of Partnerships within the Critical Service-Learning Framework

Congratulations to the Whitely Community Council’s Ken Hudson and Frank Scott, as well as Ball State Associate Professor Kiesha Warren-Gordon (Criminal Justice) for their recently published article in the Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education! “Voices of Partnership within the Critical Service-Learning Framework” discusses how community partners can be involved in all states of the critical service learning process, including course planning and collaborative research.

ABSTRACT:

Over the course of the past three decades, service learning has become a major component in higher education. Heretofore, however, there has been no published research that focuses on the community partner or that assesses the role of the community partner within the community-service-learning (CSL) model. This paper fills that gap by focusing on the community partner relationship as delineated by Mitchell (2008), the community partner’s position in CSL, and the authentic relationships between the community partner, class, and instructor. Specifically, we address the following question: How do community partners articulate their voices within the CSL framework? This paper argues that community partners may articulate their own voices and concerns through the use of autoethnography, as well as through involvement in all stages of the CSL process, including course-planning and subsequent collaborative scholarship.

READ MORE!

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Makerspaces

In the Spring 2020 Semester, the Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry hosted an amazing program allowing students with the BSU English Department in partnership with the Muncie Arts and Culture Council to explore the “makers” movement becoming increasingly popular in our cities. The investigation covered some of the cool makerspaces here in Muncie and culminated in a large enough collection of stories and data for 2 print books – a compilation of oral histories and a collection of photo essays featuring stories of Muncie makers. Learn more at the website for the project on the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry’s site, and check out these other awesome resources!

Project Website | Seminar Facebook Page | Interactive Map of Muncie & Surrounding Area Makerspaces

 

Faculty Mentor: Laura Romano
Department: English
Community Partner: Muncie Arts and Culture Council
Student Team: Stressca Nathaniel, Tamera Sims, Jack Satter, Elizabeth Baum, Mason Killebrew, Jessica Snow, Andrew (Drew) Catalano, Halie Wills, Sarah Morrow, Laura Romano, Darrin Sims, Elizabeth Riester, Hannah (Cali) Fehr