Center for Public History + Digital Humanities

05/14/2025

We’re happy to report that the Tremont Oral History Project (2002-03) is now available to explore in Cleveland Voices. The project involved digitizing tapes and benefited from newer AI-based automatic speech processing to repair compromised audio and to aid transcription. We thank the CSU College of Arts and Sciences and Department of History for sharing the cost to undertake this work. Learn more and connect to the collection page at

Recovering the Tremont Oral History Project May 14, 2025May 14, 2025 by Center for Public History + Digital Humanities In News and Commentary, Oral History. The Center has just completed an initiative to recover, reassemble, and enhance access to a collection of 73 oral history interviews about Clev...

09/05/2024

Exciting news from Wakeman, Ohio. On September 21 a new Ohio Historical Marker for Garrett Morgan's Wakeman Country Club will be dedicated at Wakeman Community Park, 9 East Main Street, at 2 PM. Garrett Morgan was a Cleveland inventor and entrepreneur who is responsible for key advances in traffic signals and gas masks. Using the latter, Morgan rescued workers trapped in a water intake tunnel under Lake Erie in 1916. Less known is his venture to open one of Ohio's earliest African American recreational clubs.

07/22/2024

Green Book Cleveland is featured in the Urban History Association Metropole blog's 2024 Digital Summer School series.

By J. Mark Souther Few things embody the freedom of American life more than mobility, and perhaps no other form of transportation, for better and worse, has defined mobility in the United States li…

06/14/2024

A new article about the expansion of our Green Book Cleveland through the participation of colleagues at the University of Akron. GBC is built in WordPress using the NEH-funded PlacePress plugin that we developed here at Cleveland State University. This article is the Cleveland-based version with a local lede preceding Signal Akron’s article.

Locations, including Leo’s Casino and the Majestic Hotel are no longer standing but their stories are in The Green Book Cleveland.

09/16/2023

We're thrilled to see that one of our past CSU CPHDH graduate assistants, Marilyn Miller Orseno (MA, 2014), was recently named the 2023 Ohio recipient of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History National History Teacher of the Year. Plus, she is now a top 10 finalist for Gilder Lehrman's national award. Marilyn authored or co-authored six stories for Cleveland Historical and curated a memorable exhibit on Shaker herbal medicines during her internship at Shaker Historical Society. Congratulations, Marilyn!

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History awarded each year CSU Alumna Marilyn Orseno (MA, 2014) has been named the 2023 Ohio recipient of the state winners of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History National History Teacher of the Year. As a bonus, she is also amongst the top 10 for...

07/30/2020

We're pleased to announce the National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for our project, "PlacePress: A WordPress Plugin for Publishing Location-based Tours and Stories." The project will run from September 2020 through June 2021. Project Director Mark Souther and Co-Project Director Erin Bell will develop PlacePress and work with project partners to pilot the plugin for digital tours in Michigan and Pennsylvania, along with our own local use case. Our content partners in Michigan include Tracy Neumann at Wayne State University and Elizabeth Iszler at Wayne County Parks in Detroit in collaboration with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. In Pennsylvania, we're working with Aaron Cowan at Slippery Rock University and Ed Petrus at Lawrence County Historical Society. The project's remote user testing will be led by Kate Thornhill at the University of Oregon Libraries. The project advisors for PlacePress are Lindsey Passenger Wieck at St. Mary's University in Texas and Jeffrey McClurken at Mary Washington University in Virginia. We are looking forward to getting started in about a month. Watch for periodic updates here and on Twitter.

Press Release NEH Announces $30 Million for 238 Humanities Projects Nationwide Grant awards support the preservation of historic collections, humanities exhibitions and documentaries, scholarly research, and educational opportunities for teachers TwitterFacebook (July 29, 2020) WASHINGTON, D.C. — ...

02/10/2020

We have started a big push to transcribe the entire 1,160-interview Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Thanks to improvements in voice recognition and AI technology, transcription has become easier, but it still requires the knowledge of content experts to review and revise the work, fixing spelling and grammatical errors, adding speaker labels and other metadata, and more. This process, while significantly faster, still takes at least a couple of hours per interview. Want to help? Please consider supporting our crowdfunding campaign, made possible by the assistance of the CSU Foundation and share our post with your friends. Thank you!

CLEVELAND VOICES is an archive of more than 1,100 interviews collected since 2002, documenting the perspectives of some of Cleveland’s most active citizens and leaders. In 2020, we begin the …

06/03/2019

We are pleased to roll out PlacePress, a new WordPress plugin that adds a Location custom post type. This project is an outgrowth of our work on the Curating East Africa NEH grant in 2017-18. We plan to refine PlacePress and add many more features going forward. In the meantime, give it a try and let us know what you think.

Introducing PlacePress Posted on May 29, 2019May 31, 2019 by CPHDH In late 2018, we at the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities completed an NEH-funded grant project called Curating Kisumu. The project – a collaboration between Cleveland State University and Maseno University – was des...

10/26/2017

We worked with the Dittrick Museum of Medical History to create a new mobile app allowing visitors to take self-guided audio tours of the galleries. Check it out now in your app store of choice!

08/02/2017

Looking forward to starting the next phase of project development: "Curating East Africa," co-directed by Mark Souther and Meshack Owino, received an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant today to support development of a new, single-plugin Curatescape for WordPress toolset tailored for optimal performance in developing-world contexts, along with continued collaborative content development in Kisumu, Kenya, with Maseno University.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 2, 2017) — The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $39.3 million in grants for 245 humanities projects across the country. The grants include f