Digital Commons Network^™

With Every Fiber, Catherine Megan Calloway

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Displaying and covering the human form, fiber inherently refers to the body. It wraps, protects, and conveys stories about us. This accumulation of work uses strands of fiber to define space, create structures, and manipulate the human form. Considering the process of craft in which bodies manipulate fiber, this work explores the way in which fiber manipulates bodies. As sculptures that envelope a human form, each garment mandates how a body may move both within and outside of it, engendering a performance in which both entities assert limits and capabilities. Each knot, stitch, and weave, is an expression of time, …

Lust Gluttony Greed, Abigail Adele Matthews Adler

Senior Projects Spring 2016

I make theater because it is social; a dialogical tool rooted in the interface between performer and audience. As an artist I seek community, a remedy for passivity, and movement between destruction and reification. I incorporate voice, text, sound, video, movement, politics, gender, spectacle, and tomfoolery. I believe in the necessity of others in process, practice, and performance, and I pursue joy in all I do.

This project is the product of surprise. In February 2015, the Theater Department announced that Senior Projects would need to be collaborative. In response to this challenge, the 2016 Theatre Makers met to figure …

Sonic Urbanities: Undoing The Soundscape And Aural History In Kingston, Ny, Alexander Sahasrabudhe Graf

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Ernest Hemingway And Alice Walker: Branding The Great American Writer, Shari Stiell-Quashie

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker: Branding the Great American Writer discusses how Public Relations efforts have shaped the work of 20th century authors, Alice Walker and Ernest Hemingway through their respective stories The Color Purple and The Old Man and The Sea. The tactics of this field have created two of the most prominent literary figures of our time, writers who have both produced timeless works and summoned a global audience to pay close attention to their work. Understanding how this attention is garnered is vital to recognizing the way authorship is created, shaped, and consumed by the reading …

Female Visions Of The City: An Exploration Of Urban Literature Written By Women, Leah Katherine Rabinowitz

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Dostoevsky's "Bobok": A Translation To The Language Of The Stage, Daniel Julian Krakovski

Senior Projects Spring 2016

As a joint major in Russian & Eurasian Studies and Theater & Performance, my senior project is a translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story entitled “Бобок: записки одного человека” [Bobok: Notes of a Certain Individual] (1873) from Russian into English. This translation then served as the textual foundation for what eventually—after a six-month rehearsal process—became a solo performance featuring an actor named Fergus Baumann. I co-directed the performance in tandem with my collaborator Eileen Goodrich. Our production was featured in the Theater & Performance Senior Project Festival, which provided us with three performances in the Luma Theater of the Richard …

The Schur Factorization Property As It Applies To Subsets Of The General Laguerre Polynomials, Christopher A. Gunnell

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Science, Mathematics and Computing of Bard College.

Leibniz On China And Christianity: The Reformation Of Religion And European Ethics Through Converting China To Christianity, Ela Megan Kaplan

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The Temptation Of Sherlock Holmes: Aesthetics, Expectations, And The Gothic, Sarah M. Davin

Senior Projects Spring 2016

This thesis will be concerned with challenging the preconceptions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, and how different readings of the text are revealed when those preconceptions are challenged. While the character of Sherlock Holmes is often considered as very scientific in nature, this thesis will attempt to challenge this, suggesting alternative readings of Holmes that might situate the character within a literary tradition rather than pretending that the Holmes character can somehow be psychoanalyzed or that his work as a detective in a text somehow directly interacted with the real world. By focusing on the …

Orthogonal Projections Of Lattice Stick Knots, Margaret Marie Allardice

Senior Projects Spring 2016

A lattice stick knot is a closed curve in R³ composed of finitely many line segments, sticks, that lie parallel to the three coordinate axes in R³, such that the line segments meet at points in the 3-dimensional integer lattice. The lattice stick number of a knot is the minimal number of sticks required to realize that knot as a lattice stick knot. A right angle lattice projection is a projection of a knot in R³onto the plane such that the edges of the projection lie parallel to the two coordinate axes in the plane, …

The River Of Blood: An Analysis Of The Process And Production Of Fury And The Senior Theater Festival Inferno, Aleah Willa Black

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Quant' Sei Bell': A Narrative Based On The Transatlantic Love Letters Of Gennaro Valvano And Serafina Savignano, John Francis Cherichello

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to the Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

Radical Recognition In Off-Line Handwritten Chinese Characters Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Xiangying Shuai

Senior Projects Spring 2016

In the past decade, handwritten Chinese character recognition has received renewed interest with the emergence of touch screen devices. Other popular applications include on-line Chinese character dictionary look-up and visual translation in mobile phone applications. Due to the complex structure of Chinese characters, this classification task is not exactly an easy one, as it involves knowledge from mathematics, computer science, and linguistics.

Given a large image database of handwritten character data, the goal of my senior project is to use Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), a recent method for finding a suitable representation (parts-based representation) of image data, to detect specific …

From 1890 To Today, Nothing’S Changed: Gentrification In Harlem And The Abuse Of Eminent Domain, Bianka Alexandria Bell

Senior Projects Spring 2016

A comparative study of the Black diaspora into Harlem between 1890-1920 and its contemporary gentrification crisis; this study explains how institutions (are allowed to) infiltrate urban communities via the endurance of neoliberal urbanism, and how the enablement of such infiltration is implicitly racist.

Romantic Nationalism And The Image Of The Bird-Human In Russian Art Of The 19th And Early 20th Century, Kathleen Diane Keating

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Indonesia’S Palm Oil Expansion & Further Contribution To Economic Fragility, Kathryn Devon Dixon

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Indonesia's growing dependence on the expansion of palm oil plantations as one of their prime exports has lead to the creation of many externalities both environmental and social, which has furthered their financial fragility. Since the Asian Economic Crisis, Indonesia has seemingly been growing substantially, but recent occurrences show that Indonesia may have more fragility than known.

An Outsider's Perspective: Walter Benjamin's Vision Of Philosophy, Bethany Alden Zulick

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Along The Way, Jeremy Albet

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Curation Of Identity: Aesthetics Of National Division In German Art During The 1950s, Isabelle Woods Rust

Senior Projects Spring 2016

In the aftermath of World War II, as nations with shared pasts and polarized ideologies, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic imagined that the greatest means of recovery could be implemented through the construction of international alliances through ideology and aesthetics. This paper is an examination of the adaptation of socialist realism in the East German 1953 Third German Art Exhibition and the non-representational avant-garde in the West German 1955 Documenta, as well as within the 1957 MoMA exhibit on German Art of the Twentieth Century. As state-sanctioned exhibitions, these three collections sought to present …

The Implications Of U.S. Development Aid On Public Health: Understanding The Connection Between India's 1975 Emergency State And The President's Emergency Plan For Aids Relief (Pepfar), Alison A. Brundrett

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Abstract: This essay looks at the public health consequences of U.S. development aid to both India and PEPFAR. A close analysis of the U.S.-India development aid relationship presents an important case study for the purposes of this essay, as it is one of the oldest and longest development aid stories in U.S. history. The evolution of U.S. development aid is traced throughout its history with India. In other words, the varying outcomes that occurred as a result of the presence of paternalism in U.S. development aid are chronologically …

Lust, Gluttony, Greed: A Collaborative Piece About Four Women In Hell, Leah Katherine Rabinowitz

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Optimizing Website Design Through The Application Of An Interactive Genetic Algorithm, Elijah Patton Mensch

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The goal of this project was to determine the efficacy and practicality of “optimizing” the design of a webpage through the application of an interactive genetic algorithm. Software was created to display a “population” of mutable designs, collect user feedback as a measure of fitness, and apply genetic operations in an ongoing evolutionary process. By tracking the prevalence of design parameters over multiple generations and evaluating their associated “fitness” values, it was possible to judge the overall performance of the algorithm when applied to this unique problem space.

Network: Audio Sculpted Through Alliance, Damien Shane Moffitt

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Network is a compilation of my work, collected from some of my collaborations where I represent the diversity and chaos of my musical career.

In the first half of this double album I explore drumming along to a dear friend’s (Leach) music, trying to add a little bit more of a live flavor. What made this more of a challenge was that I would not be able to record with an actual drum set that semester. I had to improvise and set up an electronic drum kit inside of a friend’s house. Jack Moulton was that friend. He also acted …

Intention In The World Of The Apparatus, João Otávio Rosa

Senior Projects Spring 2016

My aim is to describe how the technical image, which is at the very core of our culture today, is in fact a technologically aided method of thinking (or imagining) which has outstripped our powers to control it and as a result come to absolutely dominate our lives. Further, through this domination, the technical image has created a type of visual culture that has ensnared us silently. Not only are we, in essence, “non-existing” if we refuse to participate in this global image network but the network and computational visual culture has evolved and become complex to the point we …

Black Diasporic Memories In The Soviet Union, Davon Michael Blanks

Senior Projects Spring 2016

This project looks into the lives of three Black Americans: W.E.B Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Robert Robinson. In the mid twentieth century, Du Bois and Robeson were Black radicals. However, their politics were incompatible with the changing Cold War political climate. Eventually, they were ostracized and their radical legacies were undermined and transmitted through a liberal framework. As for Robert Robinson, he was a Black Subaltern whose story is not well known. He has lived in the Soviet Union for over 44 years, most of which was against his will. The purpose of this project if to uncover the …

The Fallen, The Broken, And The Resilient, Ka Po Leung

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The conventional wisdom of the Great War is that it was a disaster on all fronts and that the terrors of the war overshadowed any redeeming qualities. The Great War was an epoch of mass infrastructural damage, civilian life turmoil, reckless political and economic decisions, and the horrors of modern warfare. The literature and memoirs on the Great War were dominated by the idea of “The Lost Generation”. “The Lost Generation” encompasses the broken and the fallen. The fallen soldiers were those who tragically died by the grips of the battlefield. The broken soldiers are defined as the ones who …

An Exploration Of Chaos In Electrical Circuits, Ryan Ann O'Connell

Senior Projects Spring 2016

This senior project investigates chaotic behavior and controlled chaos in electrical circuits. It primarily focuses on two types of circuits: one with a varicap diode and one with a operational amplifier based Chua diode. These are the non-linear elements of the circuit that produce chaotic behavior in voltage outputs. Attempts to get the circuits to function correctly were unsuccessful, but the project includes a theoretical investigation of the chaotic behavior of the circuits through bifurcations and period doubling, as well as ways this behavior could be theoretically controlled.

Abstractions And Analyses Of Grid Games, Taylor Rowan Boone

Senior Projects Spring 2016

In this paper, we define various combinatorial games derived from the NQueens Puzzle and scrutinize them, particularly the Knights Game, using combinatorial game theory and graph theory. The major result of the paper is an original method for determining who wins the Knights Game merely from the board's dimensions. We also inspect the Knights Game's structural similarities to the Knight's Tour and the Bishops Game, and provide some historical background and real-world applications of the material.

Development And Application Of Otolith Microstructure Analysis Of Glass-Phase American Eels (Anguilla Rostrata) In The Saw Kill, Isaiah Stewart Chisholm

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The American eel, Anguilla rostrata, is a catadromous teleost fish that reaches adulthood in the freshwater streams and rivers of North America and then migrates to the Sargasso Sea to spawn en masse. After hatching, the larval eels migrate along the Gulf Stream as they mature into their secondary juvenile stage, the glass eel. It is at this stage that they enter the Hudson River Estuary. While the American eel has been the subject of numerous scientific studies dating back multiple decades, relatively little is known about their mass-spawning event in the Sargasso or their subsequent hatching and larval migration. …

"Where Do You Summer?", Michael Antonio Warren

Senior Projects Fall 2016

“Where do you summer?”

Through my senior project, I observe the historic stereotypes of the wealthy. Additionally, I investigate the way in which commerce capitalizes on the aspirations of many to identify with this small group. Architecture and apparel are the main subjects that I use in exploring this relationship.

Though it is not always a conscious process, our personal esthetic choices are often used to portray the lifestyle we have, or the lifestyle we want. A man wearing a suit may do so to signify that he doesn’t perform manual labor, while a man wearing flannel and denim may …