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  • Cleveland Historical: A Free Mobile App that Puts Cleveland History at Your Fingertips
  • Daniel Kerr
Cleveland Historical: A Free Mobile App that Puts Cleveland History at Your Fingertips. Developed by the Center for Public History & Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. http://app.clevelandhistorical.org/

Cleveland State University’s Center for Public History & Digital Humanities (CPHDH) has produced an impressive, award-winning, web-based and mobile platform—“Cleveland Historical.” The goal of the project is to build a new media tool that can “curate the city” (http://csudigitalhumanities.org/2011/07/update-cleveland-historical/). Both the website and mobile app are smartly designed and offer the means to deliver location-based historical interpretation that is enhanced with photographs, audio, and video. CPHDH has tapped into [End Page 314] the university’s rich archival resources and has embraced the participation of community partners in order to populate their new tool with well over three hundred stories about people, places, and events; thousands of images; and hundreds of video and audio clips. In doing so, they have placed themselves at the cutting edge of new media projects that seek to deliver historical content.

Each story in “Cleveland Historical” is pinned to a location on a map. If you are at a computer, you can browse the stories by clicking on these pins, by navigating through tags and subject headings, or by using the search engine. The stories are interlaced with multimedia content that is then further layered with additional interpretive captioning. These deeper layers of the stories are accessible in the app although they are more difficult to find; they are hidden behind an information icon. While the mobile app does not allow you to use the tags or subject headings to search for stories, it has the added value of using the phone’s location services to help you identify the entries that are nearby. By delivering historical content to people on location, the app has the potential to incorporate real-life visual cues from the built environment and landscape in a way that draws the public in and enhances the interpretive power of its stories.

In true collaborative fashion, students (high school, undergraduate, and graduate), teachers, community members, and professors have all helped pull together the material. CPHDH has contracted with entities such as Shaker Heights, the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, and the Regional Transit Authority to fund some of this work. These partnerships have made it possible to produce the large quantity of stories that populate “Cleveland Historical.” As a result, they have, to a certain extent, democratized the production of history. In practice, however, the collaborative endeavor is not without flaws.

As can be expected, there is unevenness in the style, quality, and feel of the material. Some of the entries mimic the bland voice of an encyclopedia entry, while others embrace an interpretive approach that is provocative and offers broad insights into the past. The history of the Cuyahoga River fire does the latter (http://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/63). The well-crafted narrative, written by Michael Rotman, a research associate with CPHDH, draws on two oral histories. The interview with a riverboat worker offers a visceral sense of the miserable condition of the river. The other interview, with the utilities director from the Carl Stokes mayoral administration, offers a nuanced political history of the fire. On the other hand, the Group Plan entry offers a very narrow lens into the past that borders on city boosterism (http://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/56). The main interpretation addresses reformers’ desire to “revitalize” and beautify slum districts through the addition of park space and the construction of “grand, dignified buildings” designed to instill “civic and moral virtue” in city residents. The included interview refers to the plan as an “ambitious, spectacular” effort to create a “grand public space” that was wisely [End Page 315] oriented toward the lakefront. There is no mention of the social costs of the city’s first slum clearance effort. The story of the Hamilton Avenue Vice District, leveled to make way for these buildings and parks, goes untold. The interpretation is silent on the impact this plan had on entrenching racial segregation in...

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