NEH Awards Digital Humanities Grant for “Curating Kisumu”

NEH Awards Digital Humanities Grant for “Curating Kisumu”

The Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently awarded a $60,000 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to Mark Souther, Associate Professor of History and Center for Public History + Digital Humanities Director, and Meshack Owino, Associate Professor of History at Cleveland State University.  The grant project, titled Curating Kisumu: Adapting Mobile Humanities Interpretation in East Africa, launches in 2014-15.  A partnership between Cleveland State University and Maseno University in Kisumu, Kenya, the project, one of twenty funded in this year’s round of 208 NEH grant awards, will explore challenges associated with extending the Curatescape mobile app concept to East Africa beginning with western Kenya.  Located on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, the largest of Africa’s Great Lakes, Kisumu is Kenya’s third largest city.  One of seven public universities in Kenya, Maseno University has more than 10,000 students.  Souther and Owino, along with CPHDH’s technology director Erin Bell, will collaborate with Gordon Obote Magaga and his colleagues in the Maseno University Department of History, including collaborative research and curation of interpretive humanities content for a new Curatescape app for Kisumu.  The project will involve students at both Maseno and CSU in spring and fall 2015.  Curating Kisumu is the third NEH grant awarded for Curatescape development since 2011.  Curatescape’s co-director, Mark Tebeau, who directs the public history program at Arizona State University, will serve as project consultant.

The Center is focused on bringing together individuals and scholarship in history, education, library and information sciences and technology in order to better serve the public. We specialize in state-of-the-art public history projects and resources, mobile apps and websites, and oral history.