The Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship at Kelvin Smith Library has announced the selection of the 2019-20 Freedman Faculty Fellows. The program supports full-time faculty, staff and post-docs. To address the emerging needs of scholarship, the fellowship aids researchers in integrating digital tools and technology into their work across multiple disciplines to support learning and advance scholastic discoveries.
The College of Arts and Sciences, the Kelvin Smith Library and the Freedman Fellows Endowment by Samuel B. and Marian K. Freedman funds the Freedman Fellows Faculty Program.
Read about this year’s fellows and their scholarship below.
Digitizing the Occupy Movement Archive to Create Research and Teaching Resources
Heather Hurwitz, lecturer in the Department of Sociology, will develop a public searchable database for the most comprehensive archive of documents surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement. The project will serve as a model for how to preserve and make searchable both digital and traditional media used in contemporary social movements. Furthermore, this archive will become a touchstone for understanding the Occupy movement, which served as the genesis of the contemporary protest cycle.
19th at 100: Commemorating the Suffrage Struggle and its Legacies in Cleveland
Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, visiting instructor of history, is designing an exhibition and corresponding history course to commemorate the centennial celebration of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote. The physical exhibition will be complemented with a digital exhibit and a database, making its content available to students, academics and other stakeholders around the world. The project will provide a unique learning experience for students to engage hands-on with digital scholarship and tools.
Exploring Large Healthcare Databases with Geographic Information Systems to Inform Medical Transport Health Policy
Andrew Reimer, assistant professor at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, will continue his second year as a Freedman Fellow to pair existing state and national databases of patient hospitalizations and corresponding medical transfers. Prior to this project, there were no national statistics on medically transferred patients. In this second year, Reimer is interested in creating a live database that updates annually. To do this, he will focus on data from the state of Ohio to later develop a national model. Medical transport is incredibly costly and can affect patient survival. To know if transport services are effective in patient care can have huge ramifications on medical practices and policies.
The Language of Reflective Essays: What Writing Analytics Tells Us About Student Learning
Martha Schaffer, instructor in the English department and for SAGES, and Michael Householder, associate director of SAGES and adjunct instructor in the English department, are using machine-enhanced textual and content analysis to study 2,000 reflective essays submitted by CWRU students as part of their SAGES Writing Portfolios. In doing so, they aim to learn more about how students in the SAGES Program describe their writing, themselves as writers and their experiences as learners. They plan to use the collected data to enhance writing instruction and assessment in the SAGES Program, as well as to demonstrate how collaborative, interdisciplinary work in the digital humanities can enhance programmatic-level writing assessment. They hope the results can provide an enriched understanding of a large corpus of reflective texts, providing new perspectives on, hidden insights into, and broader understanding of, students’ beliefs about their writing and learning.
Told Around Shoes
Renee Sentilles, professor of history, is designing a digital repository for the life stories of women and girls living in the United States. It will be a study in the experiences of girls and women in 20th- and 21st-century American culture. The stories will be curated and catalogued for easy public accessibility and scholarship.