Digital Commons Network^™

Acorporation, Inc.: Corporate Form As Art Project And Advocacy, Chad Erpelding, Ruth Jebe, Jeff Lingwall

Art, Design & Visual Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Development of the corporation was a key turning point in the institutional history of business. The concepts of life beyond the existence of its founders, limited liability, and the ability to accumulate massive amounts of capital through stock ownership changed the nature of commercial practice in the United States and around the world. This has not been without controversy, particularly as large corporations began to capture much of modern economic life. Great economic power has not always meant great responsibility, and concepts of corporate citizenship and legal “personhood” remain subjects of debate. Similarly, how corporations do, or ought to, navigate …

Haunted In Desolation: The Murder Of Captain John Gunnison, Reconsidered, Todd Shallat

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Deserts confuse, fogging memory and electrifying the imagination. In 1853, on Utah’s Sevier River, a ritualized killing spawned a folklore of deserts that lives on to this day. Captain John W. Gunnison, an engineer, had detoured into an ambush. Dismembered, decapitated, his heart torn from his chest, he had died, it was said, by order of the Mormon prophet and Utah’s Latter-day Saints. Fabulized over the decades, the tale was contorted with an evil king in a desert kingdom, with ghoulish assassins and restless corpses undead. Folklore saw what historians have been slow to perceive about hauntings in desolation. Memories …

Decolonial Public History In Practice: A Collaborative Project On The Role Of Indigenous Women In The Fish Wars Of Washington State Of The 1960s And 1970s, Rachel Klade

History Graduate Projects and Theses

During the 1960s and 1970s, the waterways of the Pacific Northwest played host to fish-ins held by Indigenous communities as they sought to protect their way of life and ensure the continued recognition of their treaty rights to fish on and off their reservations. The Treaty of Medicine Creek of 1854 and Treaty of Point Elliot of 1855 guaranteed the fishing and hunting rights of Indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest in “all usual and accustomed grounds and stations.” Due to impacts from hydroelectric dams, a growing lumber industry, sportsmen fishing, and other stresses on the waterways, salmon populations declined …

Building A Communication-Integrated Curriculum In Materials Science, Jennifer C. Mallette, Harold Ackler

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

With the need to meet ABET outcomes around professional skills, such as communication and teamwork, engineering programs have long explored approaches to ensure their graduates are able to participate in the workplace in ways that employers demand. While approaches vary and success depends on a number of factors, research demonstrates that an integrated approach to professional skill development is the most impactful for student learning. How can an engineering program build an integrated approach that provides meaningful communication education?

This paper shares the experiences from faculty in a material science and engineering program that has created an integrated approach to …

Inverting The Discourse Of Civilization And Barbarism In Mundo Del Fin Del Mundo And Un Viejo Que Leía Novelas De Amor By Luis Sepúlveda, Adrian Taylor Kane

World Languages Faculty Publications and Presentations

American critic Raymond Leslie Williams has convincingly argued that a desire to be modern is a central characteristic of the 20th century Latin American novel. Williams's argument also coincides with Octavio Paz's assertion that modernity has been a topic of interest to Latin American intellectuals since the 19th century. A glimpse of the terminology used by authors and critics to name various Latin American movements over the past 125 years—modernismo, posmodernismo, avant-garde, modern novel, and postmodern fiction—gives us a sense of the persistent desire of Latin American authors to engage in a dialogue on …

Conflict, Technology, And Integrative Thinking: The Past And Future Of Geopolitical Conflict, Paul L. Johnson

IPS/BAS 495 Undergraduate Capstone Projects

Conflict is constantly evolving, and it is evolving even faster now that the world finds itself in an age where information travels at the speed of light. Scholars of military doctrine and generational warfare are currently pondering the effects of cyber warfare on the already hectic and confusing fourth generation battlespace. Invariably, generals, pundits and politicians alike in countries across the world vie to acquire these “capabilities” for their benefit and the benefit of their nation. The last time a cutting-edge advance in kinetic weaponry was made in the form of the atomic bomb, hundreds of thousands of civilian lives …

Ancient Surgeons: A Characterization Of Mesopotamian Surgical Practices, Alison J. White, Jason Herbeck, Joann Scurlock, John Mayberry

World Languages Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: The Ancient Mesopotamian civilization, the earliest known, emerged in the fourth millennium BCE. While the advent of medicine is established, there is little understanding of surgery's origins. We sought to describe the characteristics and medical acumen of the surgeons of the first civilization.

Methods: Source documents and commentary on Mesopotamian medicine were systematically analyzed for evidence of surgery and physician descriptions.

Results: Early tablets reveal evidence of the incisional drainage of a scalp abscess and empyema, advanced wound care, fracture alignment, and possible caesarians without evidence of wound suturing, emergency procedures, trephination, or circumcision. While the asû and āšipu …

Rejuvenating France’S Choir School Tradition: An Interview With Mark Opstad Artistic Director Of La Maîtrise De Toulouse, C. Michael Porter

Music Faculty Publications and Presentations

The article presents an interview with Mark Opstad, founder of La Maîtrise de Toulouse, a choir school in France associated with the Toulouse conservatoire and partly based upon the English choir school model. He discusses his primary musical influences, financia l structure and the government assistance given to Maîtrise de Toulouse, and guidelines that can be shared from the English choral tradition to be instituted in the American choral education structure.

Extinction And Its Interventions In The Americas, Germán Vergara, Emily Wakild

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

This forum argues that environmental historians ought to pay more attention to animal extinction—the disappearance of a lineage of life—than they have to date. Examining the pre-and post-extinction contexts of charismatic terrestrial vertebrates in the Americas certainly underscores the power humans have had over other animals and their habitats. Yet, the contingencies and unexpected results of conservation efforts merit no less attention. Indeed, by uncovering important nuances in the extension of human power, they provide insights into the conditions critical to avoid extinction. As environmental history has long shown, abstracting the human from the nonhuman world distorts the history of …

Us Central American Identities In Roberto Quesada’S Big Banana And Nunca Entres Por Miami, Adrian Taylor Kane

World Languages Faculty Publications and Presentations

Following several calls in recent scholarship for increased attention to the study of the Central American diaspora in the United States, this article offers readings of Honduran-born author Roberto Quesada’s novels Big Banana (1999) and Nunca entres por Miami (2003). Written in New York City, where he has resided since 1989, Big Banana highlights issues of Central American identity, migration, and immigrant experiences. Published four years later, Nunca entres por Miami continues to engage with these important topics. My readings of Quesada’s novels focus on the ways in which they construct cultural memory and identity by providing critical historical context …

Pathology, Identity, Or Both?: Making Meaning From Early Christian Martyrdom, Matthew J. Recla

University Author Recognition Bibliography: 2022

Partly in response to an earlier ‘pathological approach’ that seemingly stigmatised early Christian martyrdom, recent scholarship has adopted an ‘identity approach’ that explains martyrdom as a normative discourse of self-construction. This explanation of martyrdom as Christian identity-making, not willing death, is insufficient for three reasons. First, this approach implicitly reaffirms the theological claim that religious identity alone makes martyrs. In doing so it reduces the complexity of the individual martyr to ‘Christian’. Second, this approach excises the existential phenomenon of the martyr from martyrdom. Third, the term ‘identity’ has become ubiquitous, and its use to mark both sameness and difference …

Basque Studies At Boise State University, Ziortza Gandarias Beldarrain, Nere Lete

World Languages Faculty Publications and Presentations

Boise, the capital of Idaho that we Basques feel so close to and our own despite being far from the Basque Country, is a twinned city with Gernika-Lumo, known to us as the "eighth Basque province". Today, 12-15,000 people of Basque origin live in the state of Idaho. It can be unanimously said that the history of Boise and the history of the Basque diaspora have gone hand in hand since the discovery of gold in the American River in California in 1849. The first Basques arrived in Idaho in 1890, when silver was discovered in De Lamar and Silver …

Lost In Adaptation:The Silencing Of The French Female Concierge, Mariah Devereux Herbeck

World Languages Faculty Publications and Presentations

Fictional representations of the female concierge frequently underscore her negative attributes, above all her meddlesome discourse. The female concierge character in Georges Simenon's 1933 novel, Les fiançailles de M. Hire, however, provides an exception to the rule as local law authorities give credence to her word and base their investigation on her testimony. However, in two filmic adaptations of the novel—Duvivier's Panique (1946) and Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire (1989)—the female concierge character is practically absent. This article demonstrates how, from page to screen, the concierge's role is dissected, disembodied, and displaced in Duvivier's and Leconte's films, and finally reflects …

An Image For All: The Rhetoric For Writing Alt-Text, Sherena Huntsman

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Alternative text is a necessary part of the document design process that often becomes relegated to the work of web developers as part of the coding and tagging of digital documents for accessibility. However, alt-text is a meaning making tool that should be a normalized part of TPC document design practices. This paper uses preliminary interview data with screen reader users to understand the complex rhetorical experience of alt-text use in an effort to offer more effective alt-text investigation and practices in order to develop more inclusive environments that welcome all users.

“You Should Pray I Choose The Latter”: Rioting, Violence, & Jouissance, Gautam Basu Thakur

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the climactic scene from the film The Great Debaters (2007), James L. Framer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), speaking for the motion “Resolved: Civil Disobedience is a Moral weapon in the fight for Justice,” rebuts the opponent team from Harvard University and clinches a win for his team, Wiley College, with the following words:

St. Augustine said an unjust law is no law at all, which means I have a right, even a duty, to resist. With violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.

(1:52:20 – 1:55:45)

Farmer Jr.’s words receive a standing ovation from the predominantly …

Centering Equity And Inclusion In Engineering Collaboration And Writing, Jennifer C. Mallette

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper focuses on preliminary findings from a study that asked students and alumni to share their stories around teamwork and communication in engineering settings. In addition to student and alumni stories of teamwork, engineering faculty were interviewed to learn more about how they approach collaborative and communication-based projects and how consider diversity, equity, and inclusion in their teaching. The goal was to connect the ways that instructors frame these collaborative projects and to surface how implicit biases may emerge and impact students. The findings reported here focus on what students and alumni participants shared about their positive and negative …

What’S A Guanaco?: Tracing The Llama Diaspora Through And Beyond South America, Emily Wakild

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Let us begin with Spook the llama. Spook lived in the animal enclosures at New York’s Central Park Zoo in 1912. Caretakers described Spook as a “morose, cantankerous” soul inhabiting the back of the deer range. Initially forlorn by this location, he looked out the back door at the road that circled past the pen. The busy street proved entertaining as it was full of noisy automobiles and anxious drivers honking. Spook watched the cars and, before long, learned to honk. Or so reported the head keeper at the zoo, Bill Snyder, who claimed “Spook thrust his head forward, drew …

Introduction To Using Python In The Digital Humanities, Elisabeth Shook

Library Faculty Publications and Presentations

The materials here are from the Python for Digital Humanities Workshop taught on December 13, 2021 for the Boise State University Digital Humanities Group. This 3-hour workshop was created to provide both a very brief introduction to the various capabilities of Python and a small lesson in using Python to pull meaningful insight out of text files.

An Interactive Guide To Wine, Crista Miller

IPS/BAS 495 Undergraduate Capstone Projects

A manuscript for an interactive book regarding wine tasting.

Internal College Of Engineering Expense Distribution Report Instructions, Angela Engebritson

IPS/BAS 495 Undergraduate Capstone Projects

When creating an instructional document, you will end up with a detailed record that outlines a step-by-step process resulting from all the of your trials and knowledge you experienced during that undertaking. I found that I learned more about myself during this process than I did about the results of activity itself. I will no longer look at training resources the same. This simple document, which could range between one page to hundreds of pages is the result of someone’s experiences. What the document doesn’t tell you is that someone most likely spent hours of research, hundreds of actions, or …

Minimizing Errors In Information Technology, Cameron N. Secaur

IPS/BAS 495 Undergraduate Capstone Projects

Our team had not been given structure as to how issues were to be addressed and resolved. The leadership was under the impression that verbally communicating what they wanted for their standards would be sufficient. However, this allowed for more mistakes than was acceptable. Faced with many different issues from user provision, to user termination to basic issues with many different programs; I had to find a solution that would help alleviate the excess of mistakes. The creation of documentation that would provide a stable infrastructure and policy to follow for technicians appeared to be a great way to resolve …

Addressing Workplace Accessibility Practices Through Technical Communication Research Methods: One Size Does Not Fit All, Sherena Huntsman

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: Accessibility of digital materials within workplaces continues to be an issue that is not readily and completely addressed through legal compliance and institutional policy. Despite the lack of marked improvement in digital accessibility, many continue to pursue a policy approach to accessibility, including checklists and guidelines. Literature review: Despite the attention paid to accessibility and surrounding issues by scholars in the field of technical and professional communication, little direction has been given to help practitioners advocate for accessibility in the workplace. Research question: Can common ground between institutional values and accessibility be discovered and leveraged to motivate value-driven accessibility? …

Sounding Two Notes: Re-Reading Virginia Woolf And Elizabeth Bishop, Cheryl Hindrichs

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Near the end of the first part of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse (1927), "The Window," the Ramsay family and their invited guests have withdrawn for the evening after a feast of boeuf en daube—the children to bed, the guests to their rooms, and finally Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay to sit across from each other reading. Conscious of her husband's attention, Mrs. Ramsay wishes that he would not disturb her in this pleasant moment of reading but allow her to go on perusing lines of poetry at random and dreaming over them, that he would for once, for …

Publishing In The Teaching Linguistics Section Of Language, Kazuko Hiramatsu, Michal Temkin Martinez

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The mission of the Teaching Linguistics section of Language is to publish high-quality peer-reviewed articles in the area of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Publications in the section focus on issues that relate not only to the direct teaching of linguistics, but also to the application of linguistic concepts and theories and the insight it provides about teaching and education more broadly.

Improving Philosophical Dialogue Interventions To Better Resolve Problematic Value Pluralism In Collaborative Environmental Science, Bethany K. Laursen, Chad Gonnerman, Stephen J. Crowley

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Environmental problems often outstrip the abilities of any single scientist to understand, much less address them. As a result, collaborations within, across, and beyond the environmental sciences are an increasingly important part of the environmental science landscape. Here, we explore an insufficiently recognized and particularly challenging barrier to collaborative environmental science: value pluralism, the presence of non-trivial differences in the values that collaborators bring to bear on project decisions. We argue that resolving the obstacles posed by value pluralism to collaborative environmental science requires detecting and coordinating the underlying problematic value differences. We identify five ways that a team might …

The Myth Of The Vanishing Race: Interpreting Historical Photographs Of Native Americans, Thomas P. Albritton

History Graduate Projects and Theses

Much of Indigenous peoples’ experience in America has been shaped by white settler colonialism, politics, and imperialism. The master narration and representation for the Indigenous past predominantly have been created by white men (European colonists, historians, and creators of pop culture), resulting in a myth of a vanishing race, the belief of many non-Indigenous people’s that Indigenous cultures, customs, and heritage were vanishing or have disappeared. Specifically, the Edward S. Curtis photograph titled “The Vanishing Race—Navaho,” ca. 1904 continues to be a significant propagator of misconceptions of a vanishing race or a long-forgotten people, even as those cultures, customs, and …

Burying The Body: Pandemic And Public Health In Hawthorne's The House Of The Seven Gables, Tom J. Hillard

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article discusses Hawthorne's engagement with discourses of public health, disease, and burial practices in The House of the Seven Gables. The recurring descriptions of the decayed house and its stifling air, coupled with the frequent imagery of bodies/corpses within it, evoke contemporary historical concerns related to “miasma,” disease, and public health, as well as changing burial practices during the first half of the nineteenth century. These issues were made even more pressing, especially in urban centers, by the devastating 1832 and 1849 cholera pandemics, and Hawthorne's experiences with these events make their way into his writing. The fearful …

Do Gender Differences Lead To Unequal Access To Climate Adaptation Strategies In An Agrarian Context?: Perceptions From Coastal Bangladesh, Saleh Ahmed, Elizabeth Kiester

University Author Recognition Bibliography: 2021

While people around the world are increasingly facing various climate-related stresses, women with limited resources in low income developing societies are often at a greater risk largely because of their pre-existing constraints on social, economic, political, and cultural resources and opportunities. In this paper, we investigate how gender differences influence farmers’ access to various resources that are critical for local climate adaptation in coastal Bangladesh. As one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in not only the country but the world, coastal Bangladesh is experiencing a significant increase in sea level rise, tropical cyclones, storm surges, coastal flooding, coastal erosions as …

Central American Rivers As Sites Of Colonial Contestation, Adrian Taylor Kane

World Languages Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the introduction to Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American Imagination (2013), Elizabeth Pettinaroli and Ana María Mutis have argued that rivers in Latin American literature constitute a “locus for the literary exploration of questions of power, identity, resistance, and discontent.” Many works of testimonial literature and literature of resistance written during and about the Central American civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s as a means of denouncing and resisting various forms of oppression would support their thesis. In the 2004 film Innocent Voices, directed by Luis Mandoki, Mario Bencastro’s 1997 story “Había una vez un río,” and …

Northern Paiute, Ruth Hoodie Lewis, Timothy Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Northern Paiute (ISO 639-3, pao) is a Numic language of the Western branch and represents the northwestern-most extent of the Uto-Aztecan family. The language is described as consisting of two major dialects and numerous subdialects. Nichols (1974) refers to the southern Northern Paiute dialect as Nevada Northern Paiute (NNP, historically also called Paviotso) and the northern variety represented here as Oregon Northern Paiute (ONP, which includes Bannock). Speaker estimates are somewhat anecdotal but generally fall within the 400–700 range. Speakers are unevenly distributed across various reservation communities of the northern Great Basin region of the western United States. Speakers of …