Digital Commons Network^™

Infrastructure, Production, And Archive: American And Japanese Video Art Production Of 1960s And 1970s, Ann Atsuko Adachi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Focusing a study on the infrastructure of artistic production and maintenance opens a space in which to examine the relationship between artistic inspiration and knowledge making, the occurrences and the writing of its history. In the case of the comparative study of the emergence of Japanese and American video art, common artistic technique employed may indicate motivations derived from the technical possibility of the video medium, while the study of infrastructure demonstrates how large-scale funding, formation of archives, the establishment of systems of distribution and channels of education affect the emergence and development of video art as a genre. This …

The Kids Are All Right Online: Teen Girls' Experiences With Self-Presentation, Impression Management & Aggression On Facebook, Alison Michelle Hill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Online social network participation is widespread among American adolescents. Prolific creators, consumers and curators of content, they write themselves into being (boyd, 2007) on social network sites like Facebook. Drawing on Erving Goffman's study of symbolic interaction in the form of dramaturgical perspective and The Third Person Effect, this research explores how young women ages 14-17 craft their self-presentations, engage in impression management, and experience aggression and bullying on Facebook. I propose that the majority of this age cohort craft online self-presentations that are consistent with their offline selves, yet they believe that other girls their age use their profiles …

Occupy Wall Street's Challenge To An American Public Transcript, Christopher Neville Leary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the rhetoric and discourses of the anti-corporate movement Occupy Wall Street, using frameworks from political ethnography and critical discourse analysis to offer a thick, triangulated description of a single event, Occupy Wall Street's occupation of Zuccotti Park. The study shows how Occupy achieved a disturbing positionality relative to the forces which routinely dominate public discourse and proposes that Occupy's encampment was politically intolerable to the status quo because the movement held the potential to consolidate critical thought and action. Because the "soft" means of re-capturing public consent were weak in 2011 because of the 2008 economic collapse, …

Women's Experiences Of Privacy, Publicness And Place In Mediated Space, Nelida Quintero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This mixed-method study explored the experiences and understandings of the notions of privacy, publicness and place in mediated space among women who use the internet daily. Mediated space is experienced at the intersection of mass media, including the internet, and the physical environment. In this two-phased study, fourteen women were interviewed and sixty-one completed an online survey. Participants were asked about the physical places they preferred and the activities they undertook, whether for paid work, domestic work or entertainment, such as sending e-mails and gathering information, posting or reading posts on social network sites, shopping, banking, web browsing, watching TV …

Gentle Introduction Resource, James Anderson Laird Evans

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Gentle Introduciton Resource (GIR) is an open-access web application that offers digital humanities researchers a malleable platform with which they can crowdsource technical material. Such material often poses challenges to the traditional humanities researcher when trying to implement digital layers to his or her research. The Gentle Introduction Resource (GIR) is an open-access web application designed to allow a single classroom or single institution to crowdsource technical information/instruction filtering out the influence of rhetorical analysis. It is written in the Ruby language on the Rails web framework. Though a GIR instance can be invoked to crowdsource primarily web-based information …

An Examination Of Western Representation Of The Muslim Brotherhood Through Various Media Outlets, Popular Literature And How Has Recent History And Outside Influences Affected The Viewpoint Presented To The Public?, Lynn Andrew Perkins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In depth study of Western media's coverage of the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. Not only using key events between the West/ United States and the Middle East over the last 40 years to show how current events are reported but also investigating where and how the media receives their information to report. The outside and internal influences put upon western media are also under investigation in this paper and how those influences insure that their own interests supersede that of complete and accurate reporting …

Backward C Inside A Circle: Free Culture In Zines, Alycia Sellie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although zines made today utilize many forms of antiquated technologies such as the typewriter and the photocopier in their construction, they are a part of contemporary tinkering with intellectual property. This thesis examines free culture as it has been expressed in self-published zines made in the last thirty-five years. It looks at the licenses found in zines as conversations between a zine maker and a zine reader. Beyond just the legal implications, the cultural and ethical effects of licensing a zine are explored.

The internet is not the only place where people have played with intellectual property and toyed with …

Coming Of Age During The Sixties: A Narration Of Lives Through Music And Battle, Jennifer L. Oliveri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis has been written based on my retrieved memory, as it concentrates on autobiographical memories and the lives of two politically opposing men, from the American sixties. I discuss the effect of music and the war in Vietnam as it was experienced by these men--a moderately angry veteran and a "hippie." I examine how their stories were "retold" to me, which in turn created new memories. This is a study in the memory of memories.