Recipients of the 2014 Freedman Fellows Awards selected

Kelvin Smith Library and the Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship announced the recipients of the 2014 Freedman Fellows awards:

• Melvyn Goldstein, John Reynolds Harkness Professor of Anthropology and co-director of the Center for Research on Tibet
• Justin Gallagher, assistant professor, economics

The Freedman Fellows Program is funded and supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Kelvin Smith Library, and the Freedman Fellows Endowment by Samuel B. and Marian K. Freedman. This annual award is given to full-time faculty whose current scholarly research projects involve some corpus of data that is of scholarly or instructional interest (e.g., data sets, digital texts, digital images, databases), involve the use of digital tools and processes, and have clearly articulated project outcomes. 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 more than three decades. These materials, all of which are part of the Tibet Oral History and Archive Project (TOHAP), are a 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 will work over the next 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 expands the availability of this valuable primary resource, and amplifies how other scholars can use it for years to come. Gallagher’s project focuses on how the receipt of federal public assistance following a devastating natural disaster affects individual finances and migration decisions. Data on tornado paths will be correlated with financial and migration information using GIS, resulting in a visual display of the results of the research. 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. More information about the program can be found at library.case.edu/ksl/freedmancenter/specialprograms/fellows/.