Kelvin Smith Library recently announced four recipients of the 2021-2022 Walter Freedman and Karen Harrison Freedman Student Fellowships. The fellowships are awarded annually to undergraduate and graduate students to support completion of targeted digital projects under the guidance of KSL’s Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship (FCDS) team.
The annual fellowship program provides students with the ability to pursue one of two opportunities:collections researcher or grant track.
Eleanor Beale (grant track) is a doctoral candidate in the department of psychological sciences, specializing in clinical psychology. Her grant research will explore themes relating to ambivalence between living and dying for veterans who have experienced suicidal thoughts. Amanda Koziura, a DCDS digital scholarship librarian, will mentor Beale this year as her project liaison.
Palak Gupta (grant track) is a doctoral candidate in the department of biomedical engineering. Her grant research will explore applications of virtual reality in diagnosing visual dysfunction in neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, and incorporating this quantification in deep brain stimulation treatment planning. Her project liaison is Jared Bendis, creative new media officer for FCDS.
Francesca Mancino (collections researcher) is a second-year masters student in the Department of English. Throughout the 2021-22 academic year, she will work with the Special Collections and Scholarly Resources team to research materials in the Hart Crane collection; the Freedman Center Digital Scholarship team to digitize the Special Collections material; and Steve Pinkerton, a lecturer and teaching fellow in English, for mentorship.
Jen Green, FCDS team leader, will supervise Mancino as she collaborates across teams throughout the year. “Digitizing Hart Crane” will culminate in a web-interface platform, where users can browse KSL’s holdings and engage with an interactive map of Crane’s whereabouts in Cleveland.
Ryan Tatton is a master’s candidate in the department of computer and data sciences with a focus in artificial intelligence. His grant research involves developing a privacy-preserving, distributed, cloud-based architecture that can perform analytics on user data transparently and at scale. This project aims to address the privacy concerns of increasingly personalized modern applications that derive insight from user data. Ben Gorham, FCDS research data and GIS specialist, will mentor Tatton as his project liaison.