Digital Commons Network^™

"Little Deaths": My Investigation Into The Double-Initial Murders, Sarah Rose George

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

An Study Of Sentiment Analysis Methods For Mandarin Chinese, Thalia Celeste Chai-Zhang

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Sentiment analysis is the study of automated methods of emotion detection in language and speech. It is an area of much active study, and has seen significant progress in improving accuracy over recent years. Many studies however are conducted on datasets of English and other Indo-European languages. We apply well studied methods for sentiment analysis to a Mandarin Chinese data set and compare the accuracies achieved against eachother and other studies. Our findings indicate that methods for improving sentiment analysis accuracy for English may not be as applicable to Mandarin Chinese.

Verlust & Pérdida: On Loss Of Love And Innocence; Entre Mis Brazos: On Belonging - A Set Of Voice Recitals Featuring German, Mexican, Spanish, And American Composers, Sonny Phillip David Capaccio

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This pair of recitals was programmed with the intent to evoke emotions that we have all experienced, whether it be the intense sorrow of solitude or the unbridled joy of companionship. Also, in compliance with the guidelines set by the concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies, half of the music from these recitals was composed by Spanish and Mexican composers dating from the late 19th century to modern day. Each concert was meant to illustrate some kind of narrative around their respective themes.

The first concert, “Verlust & Pérdida: On loss of love and innocence,” consists of two basic …

“As Natural As Earth Turning” : An Analysis Of The Relationship Between Self And Other In Improvised Music, Maeve M. Schallert

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

My Moonshadow And I, Sarah J. Sieber

Senior Projects Spring 2020

February 10

Waiting on hold with eBay customer service because I won a bid for a butterfly shirt. My winning bid was $0.32. I didn’t realize I’d won because I wasn’t very invested and apparently a month passed and an unpaid item case was opened against me. When I go on the website to try to pay I get an error message. This is why I’m on hold with eBay customer service. I’m now being helped by a person named Justin.

The item description is “Eyeshadow Long Sleeve Blue Butterfly V Neck Shirt.”

The call ended abruptly. A disconnection. Now …

Time Is A Construct(Ion): Heritage And Becoming In Quito's Historic District, Samuel Abate

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

Paradigm Of The Unknown, Vasia A. Pemberton

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This project is about portraying the essence of certain unexplained or controversial areas of belief that affect the lives of each and every one of us whether or not we are aware of it. My focus is to explore these confusions over the paranormal, the existential, and the supernatural, by overlaying, compiling, and comparing these different narratives as well as connecting them to a sense of greater mystery, or a fundamental knowledge that we are somehow not privy to.

Graft And Slime In New York City: Exploring The Impact Of Organized Crime On The Nullification Of The Eighteenth Amendment, Tristan T. Kozul

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

The Ethos Of The Blues: An Ethnography Of Blues Singers And Writers, Zoë Emilie Peterschild Ford

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Dawn Tyler Watson, a blues singer based in Montreal, QC, performs a variety of genres. No matter what she performs, however, she continually expresses a blues ethos. Through improvisation and her resolute individuality Dawn writes and sings narratives always with a nod to the blues. What I call the “ethos of the blues” refers to a blues spirit that exists not only in music, but in literature, and in everyday life. Dawn’s practice reveals that blues is a music that values protective, generous, and exploratory narrative. As important as its storytelling quality is the genre’s Americanness. Blues, derived from a …

Family Separation Along The Us/Mexico Southwest Border: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Trauma, Human Rights And Childhood Needs, Christina G. Secor

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

Disintegration And Other Stories, Brian Araque Pérez

Senior Projects Spring 2020

"Disintegration and Other Stories" is a collection of fictional short stories accompanied by two translations written originally by two iconic Latin American writers. The stories although fictional, are both deeply personal and distant from my own life.

Viewing The Covid-19 Resilient Skincare Market Through A Sociohistorical Lens: The Patterning Of Conspicuous Consumption Mediated By Marketing, Siren Chen

Senior Projects Fall 2020

The Chinese skincare market distinguishes itself with an inelastic consumer demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project employs the endogenous preferences economic framework and a sociohistorical lens to analyze the social forces that sustain the resilient beauty market. Through setting up a socially embedded framework for economic analysis, this project highlights the active role of marketers, which are omitted in mainstream economics, in fostering a bond between consumers and skincare products. With a comparative analysis of both the colonial and the COVID-19 pandemic contexts, this project demonstrates how marketers connect consumers to skincare products through reference to the system of …

Animals And People, Nikolas Slackman

Senior Projects Fall 2020

A novella detailing the end of photographer Eadweard Muybridge's life, after his return to Kingston-upon-Thames. His story is intercut with quotations and investigations into the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, an ancient Albanian codebook.

Waves Upon The Sea: Accident And In Search Of Lost Time, Ethan Hosta

Senior Projects Fall 2020

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

"She Believes She Is Herself, Which Isn't Complete Madness:" Becoming The Female Subject Through Womanhood As Relation, Isabel Rudner

Senior Projects Fall 2020

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

The Pursuit Of Capital And Movement: Systemic Barriers To Housing Access For Refugees In Contemporary Germany, Lilian Wind O'Donnell

Senior Projects Fall 2020

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

“Tell Me I Did Well” And Other Things Left Unsaid, Shirley X H Cheng

Senior Projects Spring 2020

A collection of short stories built around a disease that turns you into a stone flower. The stories explore sadness, loneliness and helplessness and the ultimate effects that can have on people.

Eurydice, Gus Aronson

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Does the attention we pay to the world around us when we photograph destroy the inherent truth of it, as it was when Orpheus looked back at Eurydice? Is our attempt to understand the world by preserving it through a photograph only a fleeting attempt for survival in the face of eschatological thought? Or does pho- tography -- the act of looking itself --- render the opaque into a living clarified truth through poetic action?

As Roland Barthes notes in Camera Lucida, “the Greeks entered into death back- ward: what they had before them was their past.” What Orpheus had …

Production Of Entangled Photons Via Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion, Logan P. Kaelbling

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Quantum entanglement, a phenomenon in which the behavior of one particle is somehow immediately correlated with and informed by what is happening to a partner particle a long distance away, has been a pivotal part of the formulation of quantum theory as we know it today and is currently generating many promising avenues of research. As such, finding ways to reliably and inexpensively generate systems of entangled particles for research purposes has become crucial. For my project, I attempt to set up a system that generates energy- and polarization-entangled photons via a technique called spontaneous parametric down conversion. This method …

Time And Consumption Poverty Among Mainland Tanzanian Children: Material Conditions To Secure Stated Rights, Marokey Sawo

Theses - Graduate Programs in Economic Theory and Policy

This paper examines the differences in how Tanzanian children across various socioeconomic axes spend their time across schooling, unpaid care work, and income-generating activities. Previous research and theory have primarily focused on child employment and its dynamics with education, neglecting a substantial amount of work borne by some children to maintain their households’ livelihoods. Using time use and consumption survey data, this paper fills the current gap in the literature by applying a multidimensional framework called the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty. The results indicate that child employment is quite prevalent in mainland Tanzania across different tiers …

Shalamov's Testament: Pushkinian Precepts In Kolyma Tales, Andres I. Meraz

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In a letter from 1972, the author of Kolyma Tales and survivor of the gulag Varlam Shalamov, declared “In my prose, I consider myself the inheritor of the Pushkinian tradition <…>.” Indeed, in Kolyma Tales, Shalamov exhibited a studied understanding of Pushkin’s artistic technique. Through his implementation of Pushkinian artistic principles, Shalamov was seeking to restore the poet’s image to what it had been prior to the Soviet Union’s politicized interpretation while simultaneously revealing the truth about life in the labor camps to a readership that could not otherwise fathom what the inmates endured on day-to-day basis. In writing …

Testing And Improving An Optimization-Based Digital Colorblindness Corrective Filter, Zachary Kenneth Mcintyre

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Computers often communicate essential information via color which is lost to colorblind users. In order to address this information loss, designers and computer scientists have created a variety of different correction methods to improve computer accessibility. One such method was created by Luke Jefferson and Richard Harvey in their 2006 paper, “Accommodating Color Blind Computer Users” which consists of a difference histogram, differences of key colors, optimization and interpolation to adjust images for specific types of congenital colorblindness. I have recreated their algorithm as well as their original test images. I then conducted extensive tests on challenging images to examine …

The Effects Of Social Media On Mental Health: A Proposed Study, Grant Sean Bossard

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Abstract

There are about 3.8 billion social media users around the world (How Many People…, 2020). How does social media use affect the mental health of its users? Excessive social media use has the potential to increase vulnerability to the development of psychological disorders, specifically increasing psychological distress, decreasing self-esteem, and increasing depressive symptoms. With social media use on the rise among people of all ages, it is important to understand the potential adverse effects so that usage guidelines and interventions can be developed. This is a proposed study to determine what the effects of using Instagram, Facebook, or no …

Bach To The Future: An Exploration Of Authenticity And Baroque Performance Practice Through Bwv 131 & Bwv 111, Megan Elizabeth Halm

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College. An exploration of historical performance practice through J.S. Bach's cantatas BWV 131 and BWV 111.

A Call For The Inclusion Of Nature In Class Struggle, Augusta Valerie Tiziana Spiro Jaeger

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

How Religious Influence Has Developed Sports Into A Faith Of Its Own, Dillon J. Daine

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

Small Packages, Caitlin E. Harris

Senior Projects Spring 2020

I chose to honor a lifelong impulse to make small objects. As my mother describes: “you've always been self sufficient and could get lost making things in your creative world. You were very independent and perfectly content spending hours entertaining yourself.” “Small Packages” is a collection of work created and installed entirely from my home. I spent a year making drawings and sculptures of a certain scale in order to accumulate enough tiny pieces that, when put together, would produce something impactful. I worked in a variety of mediums, including drawing, painting, screenprinting, casting, carving, weaving, felting, and sculpting, and …

The Spiral Model For Generative Harmony, Jackson Guy Spargur

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Generative music is a broad and well-explored field, in which researchers have attempted various approaches at creating algorithmic models for the creation of music. Researchers may attempt to model the composition of melody, or of musical phrase structure, or, as is the focus of this paper, the harmonization of multiple voices. I use as the core of my model Elaine Chew’s “Spiral Array”, outlined in her 2000 thesis “Towards a Mathematical Model Of Tonality”. Chew’s applications for this model were all analytical, gaining insights about human-composed pieces of music by running them through her model. My project is comprised of …

Death Of A Hero: A Translation Of Sophocles' Ajax, Gabriel Martin Doyle

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This project consists of a translation of the first half of Sophocles' tragic play Ajax from Ancient Greek into English. Additionally, the project includes a brief introduction and Bibliography

Foreign In Their Own Country: A Critical Analysis Of Puerto Ricans In The United States, Sebastian R. Cardenas

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Foreign in their own nation? The neglected United States territory? The 51st state that never was? Regardless of which of these questions one chooses to look through the prism of, they are all applicable when it comes to discussing Puerto Rico and its staggering relationship with the United States. These questions are all significant in some way because they are indicative of patterns of interaction and an overall story that has developed over the years between the two respective sides. These questions give a window into the contentious history that the island has had with the United States since being …