| HAA-266457-19 | Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Advancement Grants | Ball State University | Library Circulation Histories Workshop | 9/1/2019 - 12/31/2021 | $49,900.00 | James | John | Connolly | | | | Ball State University | Muncie | IN | 47306-1022 | USA | 2019 | History, General | Digital Humanities Advancement Grants | Digital Humanities | 49900 | 0 | 29940.78 | 0 | A workshop on Library Circulation Histories to be hosted by Ball State University's Center for Middletown Studies. The workshop will bring together representatives from eleven library and reading history digital projects along with additional scholars and digital humanities developers to investigate making historical
library circulation data more accessible for humanities research.
Ball State University's (BSU) Center for Middletown Studies, in conjunction with BSU's Digital Scholarship Lab, seeks a Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to support the Library Circulation Histories Workshop, to be held March 6-7, 2020. The project period will run from September 1, 2019 to August 31, 2020. The aim of the Workshop is to make historical library circulation data more accessible and more analytically powerful. The Workshop assembles scholars and developers representing eleven (or more) library and reading history projects to share insights and develop new strategies or increasing the value for these already powerful research tools. Topics addressed will include the use of computational text analysis, network analysis, ethical issues, and data aggregation. The Workshop will result in published articles in a special issue/section of one or more journals, an online video recording of the conference, and a white paper on best practices. |
| RZ-51013-09 | Research Programs: Collaborative Research | Ball State University | What Middletown Read: Print Culture and Cosmopolitanism in an American City | 7/1/2009 - 6/30/2011 | $160,000.00 | James | John | Connolly | | | | Ball State University | Muncie | IN | 47306-1022 | USA | 2009 | U.S. History | Collaborative Research | Research Programs | 160000 | 0 | 160000 | 0 | Preparation for the publication of a scholarly study, "What Middletown Reads;" and the creation of a freely accessible digital database of library records from the Muncie, Indiana public library.
"What Middletown Read: Print Culture and Cosmopolitanism in an American Small City" uses a recently discovered cache of library records as the basis for a historical and social study of reading behavior in an industrializing community of the late nineteenth century. The surviving documents record the individual books each borrower took from the local public library in Muncie, Indiana - the city featured in the famed "Middletown" sociological studies - for most of the period between 1891 and 1902. Historians of print culture in the U.S. have long sought this sort of first-hand evidence of reading behavior among ordinary people. The directors of the "What Middletown Read" project propose to capitalize on this discovery in two ways. They will write a book exploring print culture in Muncie, Indiana during the 1890s and they will construct a digital database derived from these records and make it freely available online to the public. |
| RZ-51453-12 | Research Programs: Collaborative Research | Ball State University | Conference: Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis | 10/1/2012 - 12/31/2013 | $64,622.00 | James | John | Connolly | | | | Ball State University | Muncie | IN | 47306-1022 | USA | 2012 | History, General | Collaborative Research | Research Programs | 64622 | 0 | 55942.87 | 0 | A conference, website, and volume of essays related to the history and development of print culture in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas worldwide. (15 months)
The Center for Middletown Studies, Ball State University, plans a conference to be held on March 15-16, 2013, in Muncie, Indiana. The title and theme for the conference is "Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis," and its animating idea is to explore the ways that printed material was produced, consumed, circulated, and encountered in smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, colonial outposts, and comparable contexts. A considerable body of work explores print culture in metropolitan settings, and many of the theories about it derived from studies of such places. There is also a good deal of scholarship on print culture history outside major cities, but it is scattered and has not generated as much systematic analysis. Our conference begins to address that deficit by bringing a select group of scholars to explore how print culture took shape in nonmetropolitan contexts. The conference will generate a published volume and a free online video archive of all proceedings. |