Kelvin Smith Library will host presentations by the 2014 Freedman Fellows: Melvyn Goldstein, the John Reynolds Harkness Professor of Anthropology and co-director of the Center for Research on Tibet, and Justin Gallagher, assistant professor of economics. The fellows will discuss their research and how the Freedman Fellows program provided solutions and support.
The Freedman Fellows Program is a partnership between the College of Arts and Sciences and Kelvin Smith Library. This program aims to identify and support scholarly research of faculty at Case Western Reserve University. Awards are granted to faculty to sustain projects that are currently active, hold scholarly or instructional value, integrate the use of digital tools and have clear project outcomes in support of digital scholarship.
Melvyn Goldstein: “Tibet Oral History & Archive Project”
Goldstein will present “Tibet Oral History & Archive Project” Wednesday, Feb. 11, from noon to 1:30 p.m. at Kelvin Smith Library in the Dampeer Room.
Goldstein and the Center for Research on Tibet have been collecting and translating oral history interviews and documents relating to modern Tibetan history and society for over three decades. These materials, all of which are part of the Tibet Oral History and Archive Project, are a unique and invaluable primary source on the social and political history of modern Tibet and Sino-Tibetan relations. The collection consists of approximately 1,600 hours of oral interviews with both the “common folk” who lived in villages and towns in traditional Tibet, as well as a large group of in-depth interviews with monks from Drepung, Tibet’s largest monastery.
To prepare these interviews for publication in an online archive hosted by the Library of Congress, Goldstein has been working over the past year to correct TEI-XML syntax errors from this large corpus of data, as well as transcribe Chinese government documents. Encoding the data in TEI increases the availability of this valuable primary resource and expands how it can be used by other scholars in future research.
Leigh Bonds, digital research services librarian for the humanities at Kelvin Smith Library, will present with Goldstein to discuss what TEI is, the connection between encoding and scholarly editing, and its applications in digital humanities work.
Justin Gallagher: “Tornado Destruction & Financial Damage to Homeowners”
Gallagher will present “Tornado Destruction & Financial Damage to Homeowners” Wednesday, Feb. 25 from noon to 1:30 p.m. at Kelvin Smith Library in the Dampeer Room.
Gallagher’s project focuses on how the receipt of federal public assistance following a devastating natural disaster affects individuals’ finances and migration decisions. Data on the destruction paths of tornadoes are being correlated with financial and migration information using GIS software. The project’s overall goal is to better understand how individuals respond to uncertain environmental risks and how the federal government can best protect citizens while not distorting individual incentives to live in environmentally safe and sustainable locations.
Evan Meszaros, digital research services librarian for the sciences at Kelvin Smith Library, will present with Gallagher to discuss aspects of the data collection process as well as best practices related to research data management. Specific considerations such as file organization, protocol development, and data storage and backup will be discussed.
Both presentations are free and open to the public. Lunch will be served. For more information, visit library.case.edu/ksl/freedmancenter/digitalscholarship/fellows/.