Mobile Historical is a mobile app platform for iOS & Android, 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. Built on Omeka, everyone’s favorite open source archival CMS, Mobile Historical is designed for small- to medium-sized cultural heritage and educational institutions.

Visit the Mobile Historical project site for more info.

Image courtesy of Cleveland State University Library Special Collections

We wondered whether this was an appropriate image to use on the app.  It certainly illustrates the violent confrontations that strikes commonly caused at this time, and it also says something powerful about society’s treatment of women. But does the image belong on an educational mobile application designed to be used by people of all ages? Could another image be used in its stead?

This is not the first time we’ve wrestled with this question.  Last year, we removed a picture of a woman dancing at the Great Lakes Exposition in a see-through dress from the Expo’s app site. Again, the representation of women at the Expo is a fascinating topic that caused controversy during the event and is worthy of our attention today, but did this particular image belong on Cleveland Historical?  Probably not…

In creating Cleveland Historical, we didn’t want to shy away from controversial topics or provide a “sanitized” version of the past, and I think that has so far been accomplished.  But we still ought to consider the sensitivities of its users, particularly as we actively encourage school teachers to use the app in their classrooms.

Cleveland Historical is a software tool developed by the Cleveland State University‘s Center for Public History + Digital Humanities for interpreting history, culture, and environment on mobile devices.  We like to tell people that it’s a tool through which we curate the city. It uses Omeka (from the Center for History and New Media) as its archivally-based content-management system. This ties Cleveland Historical to what we believe to be one of the best tools available in the digital humanities world. It enhances the usability and extensibility of Cleveland Historical, and it benefits the expanding Omeka user community by giving it a new way of engaging audiences.

Cleveland Historical was born from the kernels of several projects that Center co-founders Mark Tebeau and Mark Souther developed in their urban history, public history, social studies, and local history seminars.  The central intellectual tenet behind our work is the notion that cities, landscapes, and history itself can be curated by diverse communities collaboratively and in multiple media forms. The Center is also committed to engaged university teaching & learning in which students build meaningful history projects that contribute to the body of scholarly knowledge and are publicly sharable, whether in an urban tour, a public forum, or through digital means. The Center also has sought to integrate best history teaching practices into K-12 classrooms through teacher professional development and training, which the Center has built and expanded through multiple Teaching American History initiatives. Fourth, the Center has emphasized the importance of capturing human voices as the centerpieces of its projects, collecting over 700 oral histories in collaboration with students and the community in ongoing initiatives over several years. Fifth, the Center has sought innovative ways to connect digital humanities to public history scholarship. These have included experimentation with Omeka and other digital history tools and projects. Most notably, this approach emerged in the award-winning Euclid Corridor History Project that resulted in 19 history kiosks located along Euclid Avenue at rapid bus stations.

The Euclid Project confirmed that scholars could do interpretive public history in collaboration with students, teachers, and community members. As the project was implemented between 2008-2010, Tebeau and Souther wished they could carry the kiosks off the bus stations and into the city. Realizing that mobile phones could become the vehicle for innovative historical interpretation, the Center began to explore how to do just that. We are exploring how to use the emerging paradigm of mobile communication to enrich teaching and learning of history and at the same time build a durable and incisive interpretive tool for heritage tourism and curating place. The vision and architecture of Cleveland Historical was born, with a vision toward building a tool that could be extended beyond the city.

To date, Cleveland Historical has been developed by a broad swath of the regional community. Cleveland Historical has over 200 geo-located stories, most possessing a combination of text, images, audio, or videos. Altogether there are some 1500 images, 500 audio clips, and 100 videos (about 60 are visible on our YouTube Channel.)  We are particularly pleased with the multimedia content because it represents our collaborative story-telling process. Our friends at Cleveland Memory (thanks Bill and team!) have provided great support in working with photographs. Student- and teacher-collected oral histories, coupled with a rich intellectual partnership with Randforce Associates at the University of Buffalo, provide a rich aural texture, bringing to life the region’s history. Video created by students following a technique and style that was developed through a rich collaboration with brilliant local filmmaker Kate O’Neil of Authentic Films. Later, Center technical director Erin Bell developed the look and feel for early videos and then helped students and teachers to achieve similar results.  Finally, we’ve even added archival film footage from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, to lend a rather remarkable historical sensibility to a number of the stories, including the air races and municipal stadium. Even so, much of the content remains imperfect, reflecting both our learning process and that of our partners. But, also the ways we use and interact with mobile are only now taking shape and evolving, which is why we explore and study how users–from tourists to 5th graders–react to the mobile applications.

Cleveland Historical also is becoming deeply embedded in the broader regional community through collaborative story development, regional classrooms, and its increasing use in interpretive tours and signage.  In terms of collaboration, undergraduates have contributed to almost all the sites, with graduate students and historians editing, evaluating, and re-working content. Community members, from cultural organizations, community development groups, and various interest groups have contributed materials or stories for about one third of the sites. During the last six months, teachers have developed over 40 sites, in some cases in collaboration with their students. Many teachers are also using Cleveland Historical to engage students in learning American history through the landscapes of the region. Much of this work is highly original, exciting, and very much on the leading edge of where K-12 teaching is heading.

Communities have embraced the process of developing tours and connecting themselves to their own history through clever use of signage with QR (quick response) codes.  Two neighborhoods have used Cleveland Historical as a tool for mobile tours of their community, including one tour that coupled the mobile application with guided tours. In collaboration with Downtown Cleveland Alliance, visitors to downtown Cleveland can find businesses with QR codes that lead to Cleveland Historical and historical views of the neighborhood. Additionally, over the next three months, four other communities will be involved in developing and extending tours, including collaborations with local schools and the use of Cleveland Historical as an interactive tool through which K-12 students can learn history.

Cleveland Historical is the first instance of a larger initiative called Mobile Historical through which we will extend Cleveland Historical into a mobile publishing platform available to the broader “GLAM” (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) community, as well as to a broad swath of K-20 educators in middle schools, high schools, and universities. Mobile Historical will give partners the ability to deploy uniquely-branding mobile applications through which they can curate the historical and cultural landscapes of their communities; more information on Mobile Historical is available on a project wiki.  Partners’ applications–available on both iOS and Android platforms–will have all the functionality of Cleveland Historical, including:

• availability on both iOS and Android;
• clean user interface with simple, elegant functionality;
• presents multi-layered interpretive geo-located stories on a map interface;
• allows use of multiple types of media, including text, images, audio, and video;
• tour functionality provides interpretive paths through the geo-located stories, according to geography, theme, or chronology;
• basic but attractive (being refined at the moment) mobile stylesheets;
• accompanying website similar to Cleveland Historical (www.clevelandhistorical.org);
• social media (Facebook, Twitter, email and other sharing tools);
• integration with QR (quick response) codes, which allows interactive and more deeply immersive experiences in landscapes and building users through posters, signage, and other promotional materials;
• Model for practice with K-16 school curriculums for teaching & learning history;
• Built using standards-based open-source Omeka archival software as our content management system;
• uses must install their own hosted Omeka installation (or they can obtain a hosted version through Omeka.net).

The second instance of Mobile Historical will be Spokane Historical, through a partnership with Larry Cebula and his colleagues at Eastern Washington University, which opens in August 2011.

We are in discussions with several other organizations and universities to extend Mobile Historical and are seeking partners to be beta testers for the hosted version of Mobile Historical, helping us to refine its functionality as we begin distributing it more broadly.

Coupled with the scaling of the Mobile Historical project into other communities through partner organizations, the Center has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities through an Office of Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to explore the process of scaling this initiative beyond Cleveland. We have begun the process of adding new features, more robust functionality, and richer user interfaces. We are even building a user interface designed specifically to serve for use indoors, inside museums. Other new features will include enhanced tour functionality and the possibilities of user-created playlists.  Also, we’re considering the process of adding additional map layers using historic maps, as well as the possibility of stories and sites augmented by three-dimensional historical views of the built landscape, using the architecture of Google Earth.

We’re excited about the future directions of Cleveland Historical and the Mobile Historical initiative. We look forward to continued feedback and comments from users, digital humanists, and the broader GLAM community of scholars, archivists, and curators.
(updated 7/27)

Responsibilities:

Monitor the Joan L. Hrubec Aviation Education Center, assist with programs and classes, interpret artifacts on the “touch wall” for visitors, accept money for fee based activities, set up and monitor hands-on activities, and assist with other museum duties. Must be available every Saturday, 11am-4pm. The Museum is located at Burke Lakefront Airport, 1501 N. Marginal Rd., Cleveland, Ohio 44114.

Job Requirements:

Applicant must have a Bachelor degree in Education or History OR be in the process of obtaining aforementioned degree(s). Experience working with children preferable but not required. Individual must be flexible and a team player. Preference will be given to candidates who are able to demonstrate the ability to offer creative ideas to improve the Museum’s educational programming.

To apply:

Email Mark Souther at m.souther@csuohio.edu to express interest. Include mention of your experience, availability for a preliminary phone interview, and a summary of your goals in seeking the position, as well as a resume that highlights your history- and/or museum-related experience and achievements. You will be notified if selected for a preliminary interview. The Museum will interview finalists and make the final determination about hiring.

Please note that there may be opportunities for extra hours throughout the week to assist the Education Director in managing and teaching school and tour groups. These extra hours are not mandatory and would be based on applicants’ own availability.

• National Council on Public History: Outstanding Public History Project Award — Honorable Mention [link]
• eTech Ohio: Mobile Apps Development Contest — First Place [link]

In addition to these accomplishments, we are even more excited to be working with a growing number of local historical societies, high school teachers, and civic organizations, collaborating with the community to bring even more content to Cleveland Historical.

Many thanks to our users, our collaborators, the many archivists and librarians (especially those at CSU Special Collections) who have given us access to rich primary sources, and most of all to the amazing research staff here at the Center and the developers at DXY and Epstein Design.

If you have not already, download the app from the iOS App Store or Android Market or visit ClevelandHistorical.org in your web browser.

This event is free and open to the public. All are welcome to attend. Refreshments, snacks, and a cash bar will be provided.

Location:

Dr. Harry E. Eastridge Professional Development Center
5700 Canal Road, Valley View, Ohio 44125

RSVP:

Sue Coughlin
Educational Service Center of Cuyahoga County
email: sue.coughlin@esc-cc.org
phone: (216) 901-4230

Media Inquiries:

Mark Tebeau, Ph.D.
Professor of History, Cleveland State University
Co-Director, CSU Center for Public History + Digital Humanities
Academic Director, CCC America
m.tebeau@csuohio.edu

Teaching American History is a teacher education project funded by the United States Department of Education.

The life and times of reputed Cleveland mobster Daniel J. (“Danny”) Greene have been recovered by Hollywood in the film “Kill the Irishman,” which was released the week before St. Patrick’s Day. The film shows the mob violence which played out in Cleveland in the 1960s and 1970s as different ethnic mobster groups vied for control of Cleveland’s unions, trash hauling contracts, numbers rackets, etc. While the film is entertaining, it glorifies the crime-laden and violent life of Greene, and contains a number of historical errors.

Greene (1933-1977) first burst upon the Cleveland scene in 1961 upon being elected President of Local 1317 of the International Longshoremen’s Association. In the years immediately following Greene’s election, the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a series of articles about alleged corruption on the docks of Cleveland which prompted an FBI investigation. In 1964, Greene and others were indicted by a federal grand jury for embezzlement and other crimes related to their tenure as union officials. Greene was convicted in federal district here in 1966, but a federal appeals court reversed his conviction in 1968 citing prosecutorial misconduct at his trial. In 1970, Greene plead guilty to two counts of falsifying records and paid a $10,000 fine, avoiding jail.

In 1971, Greene was back in court, charged with manslaughter in connection with the shooting death of rubbish hauler Michael J. Frato, who was involved in a union dispute with Greene. Greene shot Frato while he was out jogging in White City Park in Bratenahl. In 1973, Greene was acquitted of the charge on his defense of self-defense. In the same year, Greene was also charged with the shooting of Cleveland Model Cities Director Robert E. Doggett, who initially identified Greene as his assailant, but later claimed he had misidentified Greene—who sent flowers to his hospital room. The charges against Greene in this shooting were subsequently dropped.

Greene returned to court yet again in 1975—this time as a victim in the trial of William (Mo) Kiraly who was charged with bombing Greene’s house and office in an attempt to kill him. Greene and his girlfriend were at home at the time, and, although the house was extensively damaged, both—some might say miraculously, suffered only minor injuries in the blast.

Danny Greene’s luck with the law and the mob finally ran out on October 6, 1977, when he died in a car bomb blast as he left his dentist’s office on Cedar Road in Lyndhurst. A number of individuals associated with James “Mr. White” Licavoli, an alleged mafia kingpin headquartered in Cleveland’s Little Italy, were convicted of arson and murder in the slaying of Greene.

Below is a Google tour map of places in and about the City of Cleveland where Danny Greene lived, built his reputation for mob-style corruption and violence, and ultimately died a violent death.

View Life and Times of Daniel J. “Danny” Greene in a larger map

Developed by the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University, Cleveland Historical is a mobile application that provides an interpretive view of the region’s history. Find interesting people, places and events in Cleveland history, and even take curated historical tours of the city. Each point on the interactive GPS-enabled map includes historical information about the site along with historic images from Cleveland’s top archival institutions. Many sites also include audio clips and short documentary videos based on the more than 500 oral history interviews from CSU’s Cleveland Regional Oral History collection. Perhaps best of all, Cleveland Historical is a collaborative project with stories created collaboratively by teachers, students, professors, and community members, and curated by the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities.

If you see a historical site or topic that is not covered in your area of the city, check back often because we will be adding new material on a monthly basis. If you would like to suggest a site or become involved in developing digital stories, reviewing content, or collecting regional history please contact us. You can find us on the web at csuDigitalHumanities.org; you may email us at csudigitalhumanities@gmail.com, or you can find us on Twitter @cphdh.

Current features in version 1.0:

• interactive map with 100+ historical locations and topics at launch and 100+ additional sites to be during 2011, with new sites added or revised every month
• historic images
• oral history audio
• documentary videos
• search and browse topics/tours or use the map to see nearby points of interest

Planned features for version 2.0 (due early 2011):

• support for Android devices
• enhanced tours
• user-created content
• social sharing via Twitter and Facebook
• browser website for desktop users
• …and much more…

Credits:

• Concept and historical content: Center for Public History + Digital Humanities
• Graphic design: Epstein Design Partners
• Software development: DXY Solutions
• Key Partners: Department of History, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, and Michael Schwartz Library (Cleveland State University); Educational Service Center of Cuyahoga County

This event is presented by the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University in partnership with the Educational Service Center of Cuyahoga County and Constructing, Consuming, and Conserving America, a Teaching American History project.

Download the Event Flyer [PDF]

For those of you interested in the background and technology, we can tell you a tiny bit more. For one, while the Center provides guidance on development and design, as well as produces all of the content, the software behind the app is developed by DXY Solutions, with visual and interface design by Epstein Design Partners. Both firms are located here in Cleveland and staffed by some of the most talented and professional designers and developers in the city. The “back end” of the app runs on Omeka, an open source archival collection and exhibition platform designed for museums, libraries, and humanities projects. For a great primer on Omeka, read “Omeka and its Peers.” If you’ve followed our recent work, you know that we use Omeka in several of our public history projects.

Keep an eye on mobilehistorycleveland.org, where we will be adding a download link (it’s there now but not active yet), an email update subscription form (so you’ll know when the app is released, and when new features, content, and partners are announced), and a donation link (so we can keep this project going and growing). For more information or to get involved, send us a note at csudigitalhumanities@gmail.com

UPDATE: The app is now available at http://clevelandhistorical.org/.