The Freedman Fellows Program funds and supports the planning, development, and execution of digital scholarship projects and instruction. Freedman Fellows partner with the Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship Team to advance their project. The team advises recipients on project design, technological needs, and related issues, such as copyright, privacy, and data ethics. The funding model is flexible, providing a pool of funds that can be used to support projects of varying size.

Accepted Freedman Fellowship projects are often highly varied and come from multiple disciplines, but frequently projects have a strong data component at the heart of their research or teaching question.

Some general examples of topics and applications include qualitative and quantitative text analysis, geospatial mapping, ethical and copyright issues in technology, new media in the classroom, data cleaning and management, methods of digital scholarly communication, and applications of machine learning in the humanities or social sciences.

The call for proposals and award decisions occur during the Spring semester. The program features related events scheduled throughout the following academic year culminating in a final presentation in spring.

The program is generously funded by the Freedman Fellows Endowment, established by Samuel B. and Marian K. Freedman. The fellowship program has also included additional funding from other souces, including the College of Arts and Sciences; the Cleveland Health Sciences Library; the Judge Ben C. Green Law Library; and the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences’ Lillian and Milford Harris Library.