"Cleveland Historical" and "Green Book Cleveland". Building & Sustaining Place-Based Digital Public History
J. Mark Souther
Cleveland State University1.10.2026, 17:00
online / Zoom
Cleveland Historical is a website and app that interprets metropolitan Cleveland through more than 800 place-based narratives, an interactive map, and dozens of digital tours. Informed by archival research and oral history and built on the Curatescape framework for Omeka, the project brings together faculty, students, and community partners to tell engaging stories that collectively illuminate the history of a North American Great Lakes city.
The talk traces the project's conceptualization and evolution, including its curatorial process, community partnerships, technological development, and the challenges of sustaining a digital platform over time. It also considers how Cleveland Historical inspired subsequent experimentation in location-based history at the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities.
These experiments included the development of PlacePress, a WordPress plugin for place-based storytelling, and the launch of Green Book Cleveland, a map-based website interpreting sites of Black leisure, recreation, and entertainment in Northeast Ohio in the mid-20th century when Green Book travel guides aided African American motorists. Through a comparison of Cleveland Historical and Green Book Cleveland, the talk reveals how technological and conceptual choices shape digital history projects and their long-term sustainability.
The event will be launched online. To receive an invitation to participate in events, please contact Sofia Nazaruk via email: s.nazaruk@lvivcenter.org.ua. The working language is English with simultaneous interpretation into Ukrainian.
Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. He directs spatial digital history projects, including Cleveland Historical and Green Book Cleveland, and the development of digital tools such as Curatescape and PlacePress that support place-based storytelling. His research focuses on 20th-century U.S. urban history, tourism, and city identity. He is currently writing a new book on the history of tourism in Savannah, Georgia. 
J. Mark Souther
Cleveland State University
The event will take place within a series of seminars and workshops around specific cases of urban history digital platforms/projects, "Urban History Digital Infrastructures: Sharing Expertise and Networking Cities", organized by the Center for Urban History, with the support of the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe at the University of St.Gallen.
