The Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (which developed and maintains www.culturalgardens.org) is very proud to announce that on September 25th, at Cleveland’s Ingenuity Festival, we will be unveiling Mobile History Cleveland, an iPhone/iPad application that allows users to capture Cleveland’s history while walking, biking, or driving the city. Complete with oral histories, images, and text stories, it will be a phenomenal tour for teaching & learning about the city’s rich history. EVEN BETTER, we will include a brief walking tour of the Cultural Gardens that we will flesh out further this autumn. Indeed, imagine your next walk through the Gardens will be informed by oral history, photographs, and stories. Over the next several months, as we explore user experiences and understand this new platform better, as well as work to extend it from iPhones to Android, which will allow us reach more than half of all smartphone users.

During the winter, we will work to build the tour of the Gardens in collaboration with interested delegations from Federation.  By next spring, EVERY visitor to the Gardens with a smartphone will have a rich array of multimedia history available to them. We hope that you will join us in getting excited about these tours and help us make them a richer community resource.

Speaking of technology and design, we are updating the design of culturalgardens.org.  Over the next month, at the request of many of you, as well as Bill Jones, we are revamping the site. We are making the content, especially photographs, more legible and easier to use. This is important for our users, whose profile differs from many folks using the web. Our readers tend to be older, somewhat less web savvy, but dedicated Internet users.  We appreciate your feedback and will continue to welcome it and incorporate it into the site. Every day, more than 100 people from all over the world come here to learn about the Gardens. We want to enhance that experience as best we can.

Finally, I should note that we are, as ever, indebted to our friend Bill Jones who uses this space to promote the Cultural Gardens and does a brilliant job at it. He is one of the best bloggers anywhere in the city.