| Center for Public History and Digital Humanities | |
|---|---|
| Established | 2008 |
| Location | Cleveland, Oh |
| Website | csudigitalhumanities.org |
The Center for Public History and Digital Humanities is a digital humanities center in Cleveland, Ohio, based in the History Department at Cleveland State University.
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Although some projects and collaborations date back to 2000, the Center was formally founded in 2008 by Dr. Mark Tebeau and Dr. Mark Souther as a vehicle for exploring public history and digital history programming in across numerous grants, under the Teaching American History (TAH) project, funded by the US Department of Education. The Center's primary focus has been on collecting oral history interviews that document the development of the region through personal, historical, institutional, and geographically based narratives. In addition to numerous historical, educational and professional development web resources, the Center's first large-scale project was the Euclid Corridor History Project.
In 2005, the Greater Cleveland RTA began building a bus rapid transit line along Euclid Avenue from Public Square to University Circle and then to East Cleveland. Included in the project was funding for the integration of several public art components.[1] In addition to art installations and other aesthetic improvements, more than a dozen interactive touchscreen kiosks were placed along the corridor. Each Euclid Corridor Virtual History Kiosk includes transit timetables and RTA news, as well as audiovisual exhibits focusing on the history of Euclid Avenue and the city of Cleveland.[2] More than 60 historical sites, themes, and people are represented on the kiosks, which utilize oral history audio, historic and contemporary images, and brief historical essays to curate the city's history.[3] The kiosks were created by the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities and were designed by Epstein Design Partners in Shaker Heights, Ohio.
In 2010, the Center, in collaboration with Epstein Design Partners and DXY Solutions, released Cleveland Historical, a mobile application for iOS and Android devices. Cleveland Historical is the first implementation of a larger mobile platform called Mobile Historical. Mobile Historical is a location-based mobile app designed to "curate the city" through the use of geo-located historical texts, archival film and images, oral history (and other) audio, and short documentary videos. The Mobile Historical platform is built on Omeka, an open source archival Content Management System developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.[4]
To date, the Center has collected over 600 oral history interviews, including Northeast Ohioans who range in notoriety from regular citizens to renowned artists, architects, and political figures. Many of these interviews are made available online from the Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection.