With the 2025-26 academic year just around the corner, we want to take this opportunity to reflect on the past year in the Center and hint at what’s to come. As usual, our activity encompassed digital tool development and content creation, work that we will build on in the coming year.
Over the past year, the Center continued to support, maintain, and enhance Curatescape, the web and app framework that sprang from Cleveland Historical in 2011-12. We were preparing a proposal for a new National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for the most expansive iteration to the codebase since its conception, but NEH suspended its call for proposals just weeks before we planned to submit in May. Nonetheless, we elected to move forward to develop what we’re dubbing Curatescape Core, which will combine and expand Curatescape theme and plugin functionalities — currently parsed across several plugins — into a single consolidated plugin designed to work with any Omeka theme and be available on the Omeka plugin directory. Curatescape Core promises to lower barriers to adoption, give greater freedom to pair Curatescape with any number of Omeka themes, and improve our ability to implement new features, bug fixes, and future improvements that are currently more complex due to the interdependencies between the various existing components of the framework. We anticipate completing Curatescape Core in late 2025.
We have been especially active in recent months in our advancement of the Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection, better known as Cleveland Voices. Last summer and fall, two Center graduate assistants, Bali White and Makialani Kanewa-Mariano, conducted a total of 23 new interviews that focused on social activism on Cleveland’s Near West Side and neighborhood-based public art. In addition, we collaborated with Ava Carubia, Mikel Jordan, and Jameesha Alexander from NuPoint Community Development Corporation for their project, Southeast Side Stories. Cleveland Voices now includes the first 27 interviews from this ongoing project, which focuses on lived experiences in the Union-Miles, Mt. Pleasant, and Lee-Harvard neighborhoods. In the coming months, we will conduct new interviews, including with members of Cleveland’s Latino/Latina/Latinx communities.
Even as we add to Cleveland Voices, we are constantly working to improve access to what has already been collected. As we reported in our previous post, we also recently completed the digitization, transcription, and accessioning of the Tremont Oral History Project, including 73 oral histories originally recorded on cassette tapes by CSU students 22-23 years ago. Additionally, last summer we sought a NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to fund an intensive push to complete the transcription of the entirety of the oral history collection but our proposal was not ultimately funded. We had been experimenting with various AI-powered transcription tools, but in the wake of our unfunded grant, we found a new tool that has helped us further reduce the time needed to produce accurate transcripts to 1-2 hours per audio hour. Working with Center graduate assistants, we have raised the proportion of the collection transcribed to over 40 percent, and the work is ongoing.
We have also continued to add new content on our various place-based digital history projects and engage the wider community in the process. Students in history classes developed several new stories for Cleveland Historical and Queer Cleveland, as did Center staff and volunteers. This summer, Bali White and Dawn Culp undertook internships at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor and the Shaker Historical Society in Shaker Heights, respectively, and are completing a pair of new Cleveland Historical stories on Miss Mittleberger’s School (a Cleveland school with a Garfield connection) and the Shaker Players (an early example of the “Little Theatre Movement” of the interwar era) that emerged from their research during these internships.
Green Book Cleveland continued in collaboration with multiple community partners. The project was in the final cohort named to the African American Civil Rights Network (AACRN) on January 8, the same day that Congress did not renew AACRN, which is now administered by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). Bali White curated several new location narratives and also worked alongside a recent graduate of the University of Akron on a Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park pop-up exhibit about Northeast Ohio jazz music history that will debut at the Conservancy’s 5th annual Rhythm on the River on September 14. Finally, CPHDH director Mark Souther will be presenting Green Book Cleveland at the digital exhibition at the upcoming Urban History Association conference in Los Angeles in October.
As the fall semester approaches, we look forward to welcoming our newest graduate assistants into the Center and building on the work of the past year.
