Photo of the exterior of Kelvin Smith LIbrary

2019-20 Freedman Student Fellows announced

The Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship at Kelvin Smith Library has announced the selection of the 2019-20 Freedman Student Fellows. This program supports students in two ways: offering several grants for students to independently complete a digital project and a paid internship for a single student working 5-10 hours a week in the Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship and the University Archives on a library-initiated digital project.

For more information on the Freedman Fellowship Program, contact Jen Green, Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship team leader, at jxg854@case.edu or Charlie Harper, digital scholarship specialist, at crh92@case.edu.

This program is funded by the Walter G. Freedman and Karen Harrison Freedman Student Fellowships.

Projects selected for funding are:

Encoding Sibling Relationships: Support in Times of Trauma

Anna Bender is a doctoral candidate at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. Her grant research explores how witnessing intimate partner violence affects children’s development, what factors promote resilience in trauma-exposed youth and the protective role of sibling relationships in the aftermath. 

This project involves analyzing video recordings of sibling interactions through the novel approach of mobilizing qualitative data analysis software to code audio/video data of sibling interactions following a devised coding protocol.

Tracking Cleveland’s “Food Deserts”

Gwendolyn Donley is a predoctoral scholar in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences. Her grant research will focus on Cleveland as a case study for nutrition inequity. 

Nearly 60% of the population lives in “food deserts,” or areas that lack access to grocery stores and healthy food options. By creating spatial video geonarratives (SVGs) to map and analyzing perceptions of space and integrating them with geographic information systems (GIS) software, this project will help identify key environmental variables and provide qualitative context to quantitative data layers. 

This is the first study to use SVGs to understand perceptions of food availability. Objective and subjective measures of spatial patterning and narratives of these local environments will reveal more precise levers to guide future interventions aimed at improving diet and reducing health inequities.

Mapping Cleveland’s Music

Kelli Minelli is a PhD candidate in historical musicology in the Department of Music. Her grant research seeks to create interactive maps of Cleveland’s music publishing industry in the early 20th century. She will process the extensive metadata of Daniel Goldmark’s sheet music collection and format the data for analysis. That data includes the (few) existing recordings of the songs, scans of the cover art, and the locations where the music was created and/or sold.

Documenting Women’s Suffrage at CWRU

Dalia Zullig, a third-year undergraduate student majoring in history and political science, is the 2019-20 Freedman student intern. Over the course of the 2019-20 academic year, she will research materials in the University Archives, identify and select valuable articles, excerpts, images and content, and work with the Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship team to digitize and assemble the materials. 

The final product, a digital exhibit, will commemorate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage by building a narrative on women’s suffrage at Case Western Reserve University.