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Freedman Fellowship 2023

Collection of Freedman Fellowship Digital Scholarship Projects

Freedman Fellowship Digital Scholarship Projects comprises of both Freedman Faculty Fellowships and Freedman Student Fellowships.

Freedman Faculty Fellowships

The Freedman Fellows Program supports and funds full-time, board-appointed, tenured or tenure-track faculty, and clinical research faculty, at the rank of Assistant Professor with planning and developing 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 adjacent 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.

Freedman Student Fellowships

The Walter Freedman and Karen Harrison Freedman Student Fellowships gives undergraduate and graduate students funding to complete targeted digital projects under the guidance of Kelvin Smith Library's Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship Team. The Student Fellowships are offered as a parallel to the very successful Freedman Fellows program for faculty. Where the faculty programs enables the Kelvin Smith Library to provide research grants to faculty whose work employs digital scholarship, the

Freedman Student Fellowship program provides undergraduate and graduate students the ability to partake in an internship or grant track.

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The proposed project entails a case study about the largely accidental (e.g., not the founder’s original intention) and very-rapid formation of the world’s largest women’s motorcycle organization. Specifically, the dynamics that lead to the formation of accidental organizations in the digital age will be explored, and the growth patterns visually mapped to discern possible patterns and indicators of organizational formation.
This project will undertake the first steps in creating an online digital edition of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man that will allow readers to compare textual differences between editions. Its goal will be to take both the 1897 Pearson's Weekly serialization of the novel (available in digitized form through the British Newspaper Archive project) and the 1897 Arthur C. Pearson British first edition of the text (a copy of which is available at the University of Akron) and to generate clean source texts from them, which will then be marked up via TEI to meet, at minimum, the standards outlined under Encoding Level 2 in the Text Encoding Initiative’s Best Practices for TEI in Libraries (http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Libraries/teiinlibraries/3.0/main-driver.html#level-2-content).
In the climate of today it is easy to forget that history plays a large role in the attitudes and anger many people suppress. However, it is so important to look at history as a lesson of how we can do better. It is important to have the stories of the underserved and minority populations told because they are so many times are overlooked. I am also interested in how Case was and is currently affected by the environment around it.
The primary objective of this project is to highlight health and social inequalities through burn injury rates in Cuyahoga County. The aims of this study are twofold. First, use geographic information systems (GIS) to explore risk factors associated with accidental, in-home burn injuries. Secondly, through qualitative interviews, to document the experiences of burn survivors at the time of their burn injury, during treatment, and after treatment.
The proposed project entails the ongoing mixed-method study of the emergence of the world’s largest women’s motorcycle organization through small story narrative analysis focused on textual and visual themes presented in Instagram posts, as well as user responses to them. This includes the collection of Instagram post images associated with extant textual data and, for purposes of interrater reliability, thematic coding of images in NVIVO and of textual data in Excel based on my code book.
This project will explore applications of virtual reality (VR) in diagnosing visual dysfunction in neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, and incorporating this quantification in deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment planning. Visuomotor abnormalities in PD are extremely common affecting up to a third of these patients, but they are ignored. This is in part due to the lack of infrastructure required to diagnose and quantify such impairments. This project proposes to design a virtual reality (VR) based interface to objectively examine the eye movement abnormality in PD, and deploy this setup as an all-in-one, portable and accurate tool that is accessible to most Neurology clinics that routinely care for PD patients.
This project explores the themes relating to ambivalence between living and dying for Veterans who have experienced suicidal thoughts. The current study argues that a better understanding of ambivalence between living and dying in a suicidal crisis will help clinicians to intervene against suicidal actions more effectively. The research objectives of the proposed study are to thematically understand the suicidal individual’s experience of ambivalence and identify themes that might be effectively measured with the ultimate goal of measurement and intervention in future research. Qualitative content analysis will identify themes relating to ambivalence between living and dying, cultural identities, social pressures, and therapeutic preferences. Quantitative analyses will examine demographic and clinical variables, depression severity, hopelessness, and suicidal ideation.
This project aims to address the privacy concerns of increasingly personalized modern applications that derive insight from user data. Specifically, he aims to develop a general distributed message-passing solution that allows for implementations of specific federated learning and otherwise distributed algorithms. Once the architecture is implemented, the privacy guarantees, scalability, and efficiency will be studied with various algorithms and threat models.
This project aims to uncover the historical role of Jewish students, faculty, and administrators in the social movements, physical infrastructure, and intellectual life of Case Western Reserve University from its founding to the present. A website featuring archival documents, images, video and audio, and interactive finding aids with accompanying explanatory essays, will be developed during the course of the Fellowship.
This project is focused on the authors and scribes whose lives intersected with St. Bartholomew’s, a former church complex and current hospital located in London, England. St. Bartholomew’s was present in the lives of several late-medieval and early modern English literary figures and was important in the dissemination of manuscripts and incunabula that today serve partly as foundation for the early English literary canon. The goal of this project is to track not only the authors and scribes involved with or living at St. Bartholomew’s but also the manuscripts and imprints produced there. An interactive map and accompanying digital archive will be produced from the results.
This project aims to uncover the historical role of Jewish students, faculty and administrators in the social movements, physical infrastructure and intellectual life of Case Western Reserve University from its founding to the present. The most straightforward goal of such a self-study undertaken by the Program in Judaic Studies is to produce and disseminate knowledge – in written, oral and visual forms through online resources, publications, exhibitions and talks.
The project includes scanning and organizing up to 2,500 paper and electronic documents, implementing a metadata tagging system to organize the documents into a searchable database, making the archive publicly available on the Open Science Framework (OSF), and running network analyses of the data contained in the archive. Second, the project will generate two teaching, learning, and research resources based on the archive: teaching activities for CWRU Introduction to Sociology courses and a pilot Open Educational Resource (OER). Third, the project will present a scholarly paper about describing the archive and how to research and teach using the archive.
19th at 100 is a curatorial project that aims to commemorate this important event, paying attention specically to the local angle of how women fought for their rights around Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. By producing a physical exhibition that will be complemented with a digital exhibit website and an educational database, 19th at 100 will use digital tools to showcase the suffrage campaign and its legacies in Cleveland. This project is imagined as a collaborative effort between myself and students that would be part of a history course to be taught in Spring 2020. Through such experience of curating, building, and maintaining the exhibition’s website and database, 19th at 100 would make the history of the suffrage struggle available to students, academics, and other stakeholders in the Cleveland community.
This project uses machine-enhanced textual and content analysis to study 2000 reflective essays submitted by CWRU students as part of their SAGES Writing Portfolios. The project’s aims are: (1) to study how students in the SAGES Program describe their writing, themselves as writers, and their experiences as learners; (2) to collect data to enhance writing instruction and assessment in the SAGES Program; and (3) to demonstrate how collaborative, interdisciplinary work in the digital humanities can enhance programmatic-level writing assessment.
ToldAroundShoes.com is a website designed to invite educators and the public to volunteer personal stories (750-2000 words) from the lives of women and girls in the United States. While the stories do not need to be inspired by shoes, each story must be accompanied by either a picture of the person wearing shoes or a pair of shoes that relates to the time period. The stories will be curated by me and catalogued so that they may be easily accessed and used by other scholars.
Each summer, from 2012-2019, the PRCHN has employed a small army of students to conduct in-store audits in nearly 2,000 retail outlets across the city that sell food and/or tobacco, including supermarkets, large and small grocers, corner stores and convenience stores, gas stations, restaurants, bars and fast food outlets. This data has been disseminated by PRCHN researchers through limited maps and presentations, as well as being linked with participants from other research studies interested in proximity of healthy/unhealthy food and tobacco products. However, in its current form, it’s not easily shared and requires more technical assistance than the PRCHN can often provide. Moreover, to be more useful to community and public health partners, more informative food environment indices need to be developed. Thus, we seek to work with the Freedman Center to make the database more available to our community partners and research collaborators, in a form that is informative, accessible, and user friendly. Our ultimate deliverable is a clean, longitudinal database, available in different formats that can be accessed for map layers, geospatial analyses, and analytic projects, which will be made available through a platform easily accessible by community and public health partners and fellow researchers.
This project implements database design and GIS software to offer a digital study of the movement of Cleveland’s Jewish congregations over space and time (from when Jewish immigrants first arrived in the area in the mid 19th century until today). In tandem, the project uses Freedman Center hardware and software to provide a visual study of trends in preserving and re-locating synagogues’ sacred bits (such as stained glass windows, Torah arks, and memorial plaques), as the congregations have moved. Based on preliminary research conducted for my book, "Preserving and Disposing of the Sacred: America’s Jewish Congregations" (under contract with Penn State University Press) I suggest that congregations which moved out of urban centers into the suburbs following World War II were inspired by modernist aesthetic and optimism about Judaism’s place in the American landscape. This pilot study is situated in the Cleveland metropolitan region, and is designed to develop best-practices for collecting, organizing and comparing data on a national scale. Cleveland offers a wonderful place to begin for many reasons, including the fact that it is close to home and easy to access (particularly important in the midst of this Covid era). In addition (1) the number of existing synagogue congregations in the metropolitan area (approximately 20) offers a manageable group to study over the course of a year (2) greater-Cleveland’s Jewish population is highly compact, with almost all current in-use synagogue buildings occupying a region of only a few square miles, making comparison easy to manage and (3) the history of Cleveland’s synagogues has been well-studied and documented in secondary sources, and is easy to access.
This project will apply digital tools and methods to model, study, and understand socio-legal responses to the spread of COVID-19—in particular, emergency measures that derogate from states’ human rights commitments. This moment is a rare opportunity to study human rights derogation in response to public emergencies across multiple societies over the same time period . In response to COVID-19, over twenty national governments have instituted de jure derogation, and over 100 national governments have instituted de facto derogation. These circumstances demonstrate the necessity of developing new approaches to studying derogation of human rights. National governments sometimes suspend human rights when an emergency does not exist or the emergency is long over. Derogation domino effects raise concerns for durability and legitimacy of democracy and democratic accountability.
The recent challenges of teaching stage combat and theatrical movement online has created a scramble to find answers for long-distance solo training in physically interactive disciplines. What I’d like to investigate is the potential for VR training content, viewed through affordable headsets. I believe this could be a better delivery medium for instruction in things like theatrical swordplay, creating a better kinesthetic response in viewers, and eliminating the need to mentally adjust for perspective or angle. Since targets and attacks are all done relative to one’s scene partner, a first-person perspective could be invaluable, and the ability to look around and check the position of feet, hips, blades, etc. will help resolve some of the questions students might otherwise have.
It is not always easy to be difficult. Behavioral experiments in cognitive science suggest that there are two big, enduring roadblocks to our efforts to be “cooperatively uncooperative,” cooperating with others as much as, but no more than, we would like. How do people navigate these complex challenges in practice? How do these challenges shape our interactions, relationships, and creative endeavors? People who want to be difficult in this special way (which is, surprisingly often, all of us) need strategies to circumvent elements of their cognition that work against them. We look at these strategies as performances of applied cognitive science in the wild. We will collect case studies of people who make a professional or avocational practice of navigating these special projects, and share them with the public as a series of podcast episodes. These interviews will also provide part of the basis for a future book-length study of these strategies. The deliverable will be 3 half-hour podcast episodes and transcripts of the complete interviews as well as of the podcast episodes
The overall project goal is simply a more specific version of what I set out to create with this past year’s Freedman Fellowship: A true first-person perspective model, viewable in augmented reality via something like the Microsoft Hololens, that can facilitate learning of basic movement patterns. As a proof of concept, what I’d like to create is a scalable, semitransparent humanoid avatar, or perhaps something like a humanoid aura, which a user can follow through placing their own body within the boundaries of the model. It’s a corporeal fill-in-the-blanks, where the user could look around and make any necessary adjustments to foot position, elbow, torso, or any other body part. While currently envisioned as a way of learning something like tai chi or yoga positions, it has obvious potential in all sorts of sports physiology, coaching, and other physical learning. Augmented reality tools will become more accessible to consumers in the years to come, and one big area of potential there is in how we and our real environments can co-exist with and learn from these digital elements. I suspect this will have advantages over things like the VR apps that currently exist on platforms like the Oculus Quest, and over traditional third-person video demonstrations. It’s not professional feedback, but the ability to visually compare your own position to the models’ is as close as we’re likely to get without putting the learner in a full motion capture suit, or having personal one-on-one coaching. This past year of pandemic isolation has reinforced my belief in the need for activity-based apps and solo learning options.
The art and science of teaching music relies upon the ability of educators to emote both expressivity and intent. Given the nature of musical performance, direct verbal instruction is often not possible and the educator must rely upon facial affect, gesture, and gaze to elicit the intended behavioral and musical responses. However, many future teachers struggle to reconcile the disparity between intended and displayed nonverbal signals (Scherber, Darrow, Veronee, in press). To combat this disparity, young educators are often asked to review video recordings of their teaching demonstrations to identify potential issues. However, without objective guidance or detailed analysis of affect, gesture, and gaze, these future teachers may struggle to understand how to improve their skillset. In this study, I plan to supplement traditional instruction with Noldus FaceReader software. Via an algorithm (Cootes and Taylor, 2000), FaceReader analyzes 500 key points in facial expressions to determine affect classification (e.g., happy vs. sad), valence (spectrum of positive to negative), and arousal (e.g., active vs. inactive). This objective and highly-specific feedback provided by the software may assist students to better understand content and more quickly improve their skills. As music teachers with strong nonverbal communication have been found to be more effective (Johnson, Darrow, & Eason, 2008), this remains important element of teacher education curriculum. As such, I believe future music educators who receive consistent objective and specific feedback via FaceReader will be better prepared for their future career.
Although it is widely known that "Cleveland rocks," the aim of this project is to show that "Cleveland swings." The rich history of jazz in the city is not widely understood, but it is extensive. Throughout my ethnographic research of the Cleveland jazz scene, I frequently found that today's jazz musicians look upon Cleveland's jazz past with nostalgia, a golden age of music in the city. Furthermore, during my Freedman Fellow project "Right Before Rock," I documented a list of more than 50 venues where jazz was performed in the city. In the project, I will map the history of Cleveland's jazz venues - with a particular focus in the University Circle area - using ArcGIS. Referred to as Cleveland's "second downtown," the area boasted numerous jazz clubs beginning around mid-century: The Alhambra, The Towne Casino, The Jazz Temple, Club 100, Cotton Club and numerous others. Cleveland trumpet player Kenny Davis once described jazz in the University Circle area as "a smaller version of New York' s 52nd Street." By mapping venues, this project seeks to illuminate a lost musical landscape. It also seeks to show how the jazz scene reached its peak in the 1950s and declined into the late 1960s. Additionally, the project seeks to digitize newspaper articles and other documentation that points to the jazz cultural heritage of the city, as well as on the campus of CWRU. In fact, it will feature a 1963 campus map printed in the CWRU paper (The Case Tech, Volume LVIV, Number 1) that includes The Jazz Temple. Beyond this focus on the landscape of the scene, I also intend to undertake interviews with two legendary Cleveland jazz musicians who emerged from this scene: Grammy award-winner Joe Lovano and legednary organist Eddie Baccus Sr. By discussing the past with these two musicians, I will add a textured contextual understanding to Cleveland's shifting musical landscape.
Who was in Gandhi’s “social network” at different stages in his political career? What might his shifting social networks reveal about his evolving politics? This project quantifies and categorizes Gandhi’s various “instances of communication” to network / visualize Gandhi’s social networks. In doing so, I hope to critically analyze the racial, gender, national, and class character of his networks while also considering the key thinkers (ideas) of his network. As part of this updated focus, I will also continue to focus on my initial proposal: building an interactive network resource on Gandhi that gives scholars a visual way to explore how activist ideas spread and to see what has – or hasn’t – been studied in the extant historiography on Gandhi, India, and nonviolence.
Proposed to create and present an ArcGIS Storymap to showcase the history of jazz in African American Akron in general-and Howard Street specificall. George will collaborate with Theron Brown, the founder of the Rubber City Jazz Festival who would be interested in displaying the eventual digital map at the jazz festival. George is requesting this funding to support the project. These funds would be used to hire research assistants to project for data management. Students will also be trained to use ArcGIS.
This project focuses on developing and supporting the existing play-base intervention system (PRETEND) for children with developmental disorders. “The PRETEND Program is a remote, play-based intervention that seeks to improve social cognition in children with PWS.” The intervention utilizes web-based communication systems, such as Zoom, which requires an interventionist at every session. The proposal is to work with the Digital Scholarship Team to develop a digital platform for an expansion project that aims to train other clinicians to successfully deliver the PRETEND intervention program. Funding is requested to support website software, domain purchase, and incentives for trainees and participants.
Proposed to build upon previous work bringing motion capture into the actor movement classroom (assisted by Freedman Fellowship), which was popular with students and has inspired them to be able to do more with the technology. Building on this work will give students the chance to “perform paired scene work using digital character avatars, done live using motion and performance capture, within a virtual environment, using Unity or Unreal Engine. This can be done real-time, where they can see their own digital avatars move as they move.
Proposed to engage students in a curatorial project focused on the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) that “aims to highlight the complex history of this struggle and to connect it to contemporary discussions. This is “an educational project with both an impact on the University’s community (through students' work and the physical exhibition) and a broader outreach (through the website) that will offer a visual and interactive platform to engage with the history of this very timely topic.