Project Description

Curating East Africa
Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (CPHDH)
at Cleveland State University
Smart City Project Overview

Curating East Africa was part of a five-year project funded by two National Endowment for the Humanities grants to develop a mobile-first strategy and WordPress theme and plugin to support robust humanities-centered, location-based interpretation in developing-world contexts.

Curating East Africa involved a transnational research team and resulted in the adaptation of the Center’s Curatescape mobile publishing platform for WordPress, providing a platform and process for a model of sustainable and affordable location-based digital storytelling optimized by developing nations informed by research with collaborating Kenyan scholars. It also created a pilot website in which students in the U.S. and Kenya co-curated more than 50 geo-located illustrated essays about historic sites in the western Kenyan city of Kisumu.

Organization's mission and/or purpose

The Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (CPHDH) at Cleveland State University Department of History develops state-of-the-art public humanities projects and resources rooted in scholarly disciplines in concert with university and K-12 educators and students, libraries, museums and cultural institutions, and neighborhood organizations.

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IMPACT STATEMENT

Curating East Africa offered a set of lessons and best practices for academic collaboration, public engagement, and digital humanities research, provided an open-source toolset for extending the world’s most-used content management system, and left a significant web-based collection of narratives about heritage sites that contribute to the democratization of access to humanities knowledge.

Project point

J. Mark Souther, Ph.D.
[email protected]

 

 

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