Everyday Life in Middletown (EDLM) was a community engagement project in which citizens of Muncie collaborated with Ball State faculty to represent and record everyday life in the Muncie area. More than 50 volunteers participated, providing diaries that record their activities, thoughts, and feelings on specific days.
The students also produced an experimental documentary film, Everyday Melodies, in the project’s first phase.
The project had two major aims: 1) to promote productive dialogue and connection around the concept of everyday life; this aim was founded on the belief that attention to everyday life reveals both widely shared experiences and substantive differences that can serve to forge connections and promote empathy among disparate segments of the community. 2) To construct a record of everyday life in contemporary Muncie that will prove of value to future historians and other scholars. The project is best understood as a collaborative art project, in which ordinary citizens create and collaborate on aesthetic artifacts (the diaries, the film) as a way of tuning into and sharing their own everyday lives, in the process creating a mosaic that represents the everyday life of the community.