Building on threads already being offered, I hope to extend those discussions in both theoretical and practical ways. Theoretically, I want to explore the city as a museum (following on Anna Kruse’s recent post) and, practically, I want to speak about phase II of our Euclid Corridor History Project, which seeks to do just that.
In what ways are city’s museums, collections of stories and objects, to be collected, curated, and interpreted? How do digital tools (such as Omeka) help us with this work? Is it desirable to move from the physical universe to the virtual universe, especially when thinking about curating cities? What are the implications for teaching, research, and public history?
Questions like these have become central to my work in Cleveland as our Center for Regional & Public History at Cleveland State has transformed Cleveland and Northeast Ohio into a learning laboratory for undergraduates, K-12 teachers and their students, and community members. Our work in this area began about ten years ago with forays into exploring the history of public art through the Cleveland Cultural Gardens. More recently, we are exploring how to integrate our interpretive work with the online collecting arm of university library, best embodied by their Cleveland Memory Project (with over 20,000 items currently available on regional history, and over 100,000 additional items being slowly added, and which is now integrated with ten regional libraries in Ohio’s Heritage Northeast.)
In November, phase I of our signature project, the Euclid Corridor History Project will be up and running. The project to interpret the region’s history and remake place in Cleveland emerged from a public art project for the Greater Cleveland Regional Transportation Authority $168 million effort to develop rapid transit along the city’s spine, Euclid Avenue. We have envisioned a “virtual” Euclid Avenue that will run parallel to the “real” Euclid Avenue, with interfaces between the virtual, historic world and the physical world of buses and transit located at key points along the corridor. Embodied by 19 history kiosks (shown on a blog entry at our testing of the prototype in July 2007 at Cleveland’s Ingenuity Festival) that will be located at 12 stops along the corridor, the project has as its goal to transform the city into a museum. We have develop a kiosk interface that is map driven and potentially dynamic, especially if we can figure out how to use Omeka as the underlying CMS for the project, all of which would come into existence in phase II of the project.
As we finish phase I of the project and begin developing a dynamic version in Phase II, embodying web 2.0 principles, we are faced with a number of practical questions about technology, project management, institutional coordination, and lingering philosophical questions about the possibilities of transforming the physical world into a virtual museum.
The project itself underscores the broader question about turning cities into museums and about civic engagement, following on Marjorie’s thread from earlier in the month.
But, there are lots of practical issues tied to this process that cannot be ignored, at least in my experience.These include how to build and maintain the technological infrastructure. What technologies? Whose role is the technological expertise? How do we pay for it? Whose server? Whose responsibility is it for maintaining that community memory? Is it really the purview of universities?
In our projects, we have been collaborating with undergraduates, k-12 teachers and their students, community groups, and major cultural institutions. We all might be able to agree upon a model of shared authority, but really, how can authority be shared between and among these groups? Each, after all, has different institutional, economic, and social positions? What induces a museum such as the Cleveland Museum of Art to participate, making their vast digital collections public? While that might be the future, part of the problem is that their educational programs derive a revenue stream from providing programs to teachers that use/involve those images? What happens if we propose solutions that all but remove the institution from the interpretive frame?
Moving from problems of shared authority, in terms of display and interpretation, to the question of shared resources, how do we build an institutional framework for such collaborations? Is it merely about creating the repositories and asking for contributions? How can we then get those contributions to stream into the collections? How can we build meaningful and comprehensive collections in this fashion. Or, is it desirable to develop a deeper and more profound level of collaboration–an active process–in which institutions and individuals would become invested in the making contributions to such a collection? It would seem that the latter approach requires an institutional investment in personnel resources, which is expensive.
Finally, how do we explain this history 2.0 model in a way that can engage funders, not to mention partners in the process? Greater Cleveland RTA has serious worries about the veracity of content on the street; but in a world of shared authority, some of that ownership is given up to the community. Indeed, among the most significant of the remaining challenges for our current projects is the process of educating the community broadly about history 2.0. It turns out the majority of our partners are spooked about losing control over sole authorship and historical objectivity, not to mention that traditional community organizer types have relatively unsophisticated understandings of technology.
Those are just some of the question on my mind, presented in a rather stream-of-consciousness fashion as I mull over some of the issues that I want to explore. I look forward to hearing what the *right* questions are and how we might answer them!
