Our ambition at the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities, and mine particularly as a digital scholar, is to “curate the city,” to organize it as a living museum exhibition, understood in the broadest terms. (My colleague Mark Souther and I have written an essay that we are about to submit on this question.) Most simply, this concept builds on the practices of urban and public historians working at universities, expanding it and making that role explicit and digital, but also using the model of a curator, as opposed to the scholar.

We have been exploring the process of doing this in a particular place–Cleveland.

In 2009, we debuted the Euclid Corridor Project, in which we explored the region’s history and identity through the lens of Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue.  The project created a “virtual” Euclid Avenue that runs parallel to the “real” Euclid Avenue; it is located on 22 touch-screen kiosks placed along Euclid Avenue.  Like our earlier project on the Cleveland Cultural Gardens, the notion is a crowdsourced interpretive approach to curating the city and its history. At the same time, we have been building Teaching & Learning Cleveland, working with teachers, students, and the community. We also have great digital resources in Cleveland, much of it associated with the excellent library of own home institution and its Cleveland Memory Project.

What I am interested in is discussion models of doing this work; sites like CityLore’s City of Memory and the City or the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s PhilaPlace.

So, I would propose a session of questions about the tensions inherent in this, as well as the digital possibilities and challenges, especially the tension of collecting verse interpreting. What are the “objects” that we are curating? What to collect, what to document, what to interpret? Also, what is the role of maps. What sorts of digital tools–especially open source tools are available? What are the costs/benefits of those? How do you capture the physicality of place and connect people to those landscapes? How to meld the work of different interest groups? Finally, what is the role of the map in the project, ala Hypercities, and the “Web 3.0, the birth of the geo-temporal human web.”

Or, not; let’s have a discussion predicated on our vision of what is involved as a digital curator of landscape.

We (in Cleveland State University’s History Department and the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities) have developed Teaching & Learning Cleveland as a way to transform the region into a learning laboratory for upper-level university courses, as well as regional K-12 classrooms. We use Omeka as the basis for our collecting, archiving, research, and storytelling process.  Among our teaching partnerships are two Teaching American History Grants: a) Sounds of American History and b) Constructing, Consuming, and Conserving American History; we’ve also partnered with the Ohio Historical Society on the Ohio Civil War 150 project.

Also, we developed Cleveland History Blogs as a way for faculty and community partners to blog about and document their work, from building course syllabi to developing project-based blogs. I use the blogs for my lower-level and upper-level teaching, for example my United States History Survey, History 111.

My questions, relative to these projects run the gamut, from the following: How do we build collaboration with students and communities, especially at the upper level? How do we develop spontaneous classrooms, that are not linear, at the lower level? How much is too much–meaning how do we direct an appropriate amount of resources to facilitate best practices teaching?