ARCADE

Insights

Where does ARCADE come from?

ARCADE grows out of ASU’s Public History Program and more than three decades of building public and digital history with communities across the globe.

By Mark Tebeau and Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic) ·

The Public History Program in Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies is one of the oldest in the field. Noel J. Stowe founded it in 1980, and he was there at the founding of public history itself: a founding member of the National Council on Public History in 1979, and later its chair. Today, more than forty years since its founding, the program’s students, scholars, and community partners make exhibitions, digital projects, and oral histories together with museums, archives, historical societies, and tribal communities. Many of our students go on to careers in archives and museums, where most of the past actually lives, including at the Arizona Historical Society, where several of our graduates play vital roles in the organization.

The program also teaches history where it happened. Erin Craft helped plan and lead our World War II Study Away program, which takes students to Washington, D.C., and to New Orleans, home of ASU’s partner the National WWII Museum. She is now planning our upcoming Grand Canyon Field School. It is some of the most innovative work the program does: history taught in place, at the sites it interprets and inside the institutions that keep it, alongside the people who do the work.

Our 2025 State of the Program report, Putting History to Work in the World, tells the larger story. Visit the Public History Program.

Cover of the report Public History: Putting History to Work in the World, September 2025
Read the report

How we came to this problem

We came to the problem of undescribed collections through work of our own. For more than three decades, Mark Tebeau has built public and digital history with communities, and the field has taken up what he built. In Cleveland, collecting oral histories and building the Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection showed him how public historians could gather a community around its own historical questions. In 2008 he founded the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. There, with students and community partners, he built Cleveland Historical, a mobile project that treats the city as a living museum, and Curatescape, the Omeka-based framework beneath it, which now carries more than 150 projects around the world. With the Ohio Historical Society, the center built the digital side of Ohio Civil War 150, and then the Museum Mobile Initiative.

At ASU, the same practice became Salt River Stories, more than 200 stories of the Valley of the Sun, written by students with the communities they describe. Mark’s essay on curation in the Handbook of Digital Public History (2022), which he co-edited, drew the argument out of that practice: history takes many forms, and curation is at its core.

Then, in the spring of 2020, as the pandemic closed archives and museums, ASU’s public historians launched A Journal of the Plague Year, a public archive of the COVID-19 pandemic that became the largest born-digital archive of how people lived through it, built with more than 300 curators, students, and contributors on several continents. At ASU, Mark Tebeau, Katy Kole de Peralta, and Erin Craft led it, with Marissa Rhodes, then a postdoctoral fellow, as its managing director. The archive gathered more than 20,000 stories as they happened, from hospitals and classrooms, rural towns and refugee communities. With a few notable exceptions, such as the ends and beginnings of semesters, our description kept pace with the collecting, though in the early days that was exceptionally hard. As the pandemic became part of ordinary life, contributions gradually slowed, and our ability to keep up improved.

Katy Kole de Peralta, one of the archive’s curators, has written about what it taught. In the summer of 2020, ASU’s history department offered its first remote, digital internship inside the archive: graduate students each found a silence in the record and set out to fill it, with a collecting plan, their own networks, and oral history interviews. She described that work in Collections. With Marissa Rhodes, she later argued in The Public Historian that the pandemic was a “slow disaster,” not a single crisis, and that documenting one takes a “rolling-response” archive, one that keeps collecting as the disaster unfolds.

ASU and AI

ARCADE also grew up at a university that decided early to take AI seriously. In January 2024, ASU became the first university to partner with OpenAI, and it opened an AI Innovation Challenge that invited faculty and staff to propose what they would do with the new tools. ASU’s Knowledge Enterprise Research Technology Office and Research Computing now also run open-source models on the university’s own research hardware. We hope soon to be running open models on Sol, the university’s supercomputer. Partners’ collections are never used to train models.

In The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where the Public History Program lives, that commitment has a home among the faculty. Kyle Jensen, assistant dean of artificial intelligence and emerging digital technologies, leads The College AI Academy, where faculty from across the humanities and the sciences meet every month to work out what AI means for their own fields. Jonathan McMichael, a librarian and educator by training, was especially important to ARCADE’s early work as The College’s AI specialist; he is now an AI strategist with ASU Enterprise Technology’s AI Practice. Both have helped ARCADE find its footing at ASU, and both are asking a question ARCADE asks too: what AI means for the work of each field, on that field’s own terms.

From a prompt to a practice

In 2025, through the AI Innovation Challenge, we began asking whether AI could help. The first experiments were prompts written against the archive itself. One test, in July 2025, gave a model six oral histories and a curatorial prompt, and it identified eight themes running through them. One was anxiety, which the human curators had not used to describe those records. Other tests, including runs on the Hermit Herald newsletters, went less well, and they changed the method.

What we learned was that no single prompt would do the work. The work needed to be governed: bounded evidence, separate stages for description and interpretation, a written charter for each collection, decisions made by people who know it, and a record of what changed and why. The project became ARCADE in March 2026. The name comes from the Paris arcades that Walter Benjamin walked. An archive is an arcade too, lined with things set out to be found, and most of its windows are dark. It is still a public history project at heart. It begins with a collection, and with the people who keep it and use it, and it asks them first.

Sources

A note on authorship: ARCADE is built through AI-inflected practice. The team asked Claude to draft this post from the Public History page and ARCADE’s project records. It was rewritten by Mark Tebeau and Claude Opus 5.5. Effective use of AI announces its provenance and use.