Creating Knowledge

Emerging media affect how we get information, how we socialize, how we shop, and where we might get our next job.

Ball State faculty members have been participating in cutting edge research for several years, focusing on various facets of emerging media and playing a key role in delivering information, developing Indiana's digital economy, and assisting the state's growing media companies. A sample of their work is described below.

• The Center for Media Design's Insight and Research has pioneered research on how consumers use media. Not only have researchers recorded what their subjects are watching (or reading or listening to) but also how much attention they’re paying to it and whether they’re using more than one medium at a time. Other Insight and Research projects have yielded remarkable findings on how we really watch video and how people communicate in the digital age.

• Faculty members making up the Digital Policy Institute (DPI) were instrumental in 2006 in persuading the Indiana legislature to pass the state's most comprehensive telecom industry reform bill in two decades. A DPI study released in 2008 found that the telecom reform bill resulted in $516 million in capital investments and the creation of more than 2,200 jobs.

• Ball State's Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER), led by director Mike Hicks, has been at the forefront of analyzing economic trends impacting Hoosier residents and businesses. A CBER study recently found that investing in emerging media would be critical to job creation in the coming years.

• Researchers from Ball State's Department of Computer Science have been at the forefront of computer-related research projects. Members of the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC), established by the National Science Foundation, combine real-world data and university research to develop and improve software. Among the projects at SERC is an initiative, funded by a $1 million grant, to develop improvements to software used by the U.S. military.

• In December 2009, Ball State's College of Architecture was recognized as one of the top three architecture schools in digital design by ARCHITECT magazine. The College's Institute for Digital Fabrication has received national and international recognition for work that, according to Dwell magazine is, "really rumbling at the frontier of digital design and production."

New faculty-led research efforts in emerging media are overseen and supported by the Emerging Media Initiative.