Digital Commons Network^™

Testing Whisper Ai As A Tool For Digital Library Workflows, Kenneth Cotich

Library Staff Publications and Research

This presentation was included as a part of town hall meeting for the librarians and employees of the Claremont Colleges Library. The content is focused around how recent advancements in Whisper AI allow for new directions in workflows involving oral histories and video production.

Indigenous Labor And Survival On The Colonial Pacific Coast, 1740-1849, Arenaria Cramer

2024 CLAREMONT COLLEGES LIBRARY UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH AWARD

Examining the colonial contexts of Russian Alaska, the Oregon Territory, and Spanish California, Arenaria’s research explores the myriad ways in which Indigenous labor—both before and after European colonization—shaped the landscape, both physical and social, of the North American Pacific Coast.

The Grammar Of Approximating Number Pairs (Anps) In Mandarin Chinese, Xuehuai He

2024 CLAREMONT COLLEGES LIBRARY UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH AWARD

"There are twenty or thirty people." What exactly does this mean? Is it exactly twenty or thirty, or is it an approximate range? What about "twenty or twenty-six people"? Approximating number pairs (ANPs) are a kind of approximative expression that takes a number pair and expresses a quantity close to it. There are constraints on the structure and choice of numerals: many combinations would be ungrammatical or denote a precise disjunction rather than being approximative. Studies like Eriksson et al. (2010) statistically generalized the grammar of ANPs through corpus studies on select European languages. However, these surface-level generalizations fail to …

Korean America: Korean Diasporic Movements In Los Angeles Throughout The 20th And 21st Century, Becca Choe

2024 CLAREMONT COLLEGES LIBRARY UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH AWARD

This paper explores Korean Angeleno immigration while highlighting the development of Koreatown, the emergence of the Korean merchant class, generational tensions through the history of the Korean church, and ethnic strains between Korean and Black Angeleno communities.

Halophilic Diversity In The Salton Sea: Identifying Resiliency And Abundance In Extremophiles Across Salt Gradients, Daniel A. Bonilla, Sophia Lore, Mckayla K. Proulx, Bertha M. Posada Villanueva

2024 CLAREMONT COLLEGES LIBRARY UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH AWARD

The Salton Sea is a body of water located in Southern California and is the largest lake by surface area in the state. The Sea continues to experience significant environmental changes—including increasing salinity—due to evaporative loss consequent to major changes in water management and agricultural runoff. To better understand the impact of increasing salinity on microbial communities, this study evaluates the effects of salinity on the growth of halophilic bacteria in the Salton Sea. Bacterial growth in media containing salt concentrations of 5%, 8%, and 11% was evaluated. Serially diluted samples were evaluated to determine the Most Probable Number (MPN) …

Divided By Design? Urban Renewal's Differential Impacts On Economic Outcomes By Race, Derik Suria

2024 CLAREMONT COLLEGES LIBRARY UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH AWARD

This paper focuses on urban renewal in Chicago. There is remarkable continuity within the roots of urban renewal; many renewal projects were based on plans by large corporations, businesses, merchants, and other entities with substantial involvement and stake in urban center real estate. The implicit relationship between powerful business owners and city planners demonstrated how urban renewal supported a mutually beneficial, and even symbiotic relationship. Resources from the Claremont Colleges Library helped me to research my senior thesis and led me to take an interdisciplinary and novel approach toward the impacts of urban renewal from an individual and city-level perspective.

Local Competition, Multimarket Contact, And Product Quality: Evidence From Internet Service Provision, Kyle Wilson

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

I investigate the effect of competition on quality in the internet service provision industry: I examine both local competition within markets and multimarket contact among firms across markets. This industry offers an ideal setting, as quality is both objective and measurable. I use data from speedtest.net from 2008 to 2014 to estimate a reduced-form model of the effects of local competition and multimarket contact on realized consumer download speeds. I find that increased multimarket contact leads to decreased download speeds, which is consistent with the mutual forbearance hypothesis. I also find that duopolies lead to faster download speeds than do …

Ritualized Affective Performances: Syriac Etiquette Guides And Systems Intelligence In Early Christian-Muslim Encounters, Luis Josué Salés

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

In 2009, Michael Penn published a transcription and English translation of two Syriac texts, To the Rulers of the World (ܠܘܬ ܪ''ܝܫܢܐ ܕܥܠܡܐ) and Concerning the Entrance before a New Emir (ܕܡܥܠܬܐ ܨܝܕ ܐܡܝܪܐ ܚܕܬܐ). This essay proposes a new historiographical approach to these texts based on the concepts and theoretical apparatus of systems intelligence theory and affect theory. I show how these texts use key Islamic theological and cultural ideas that would affectively resonate with the Muslim authorities while remaining non-objectionable to the orthodoxy of the Assyrian Church of the East. Specifically, I argue that Christians sometimes sought to …

Senior Thesis Aproval Form, Jennifer E. Beamer, Kenneth Cotich

Library Staff Publications and Research

Please Download this form for submission with your Senior Thesis's per the Claremont Colleges Library.

Submit this form and your senior thesis during the initial submission process to Scholarship@Claremont. Please note: submissions with no signature(s) from a faculty reader will be immediately removed from the publishing queue.

The Conundrum Of Senior Thesis In The Library's Open Access Institutional Repository, Jennifer E. Beamer, Kenneth Cotich

Library Staff Publications and Research

Scholarship@Claremont (S@C) is the official institutional repository for the Claremont Colleges Consortium (a group of seven library arts colleges in Southern California) and is managed by The Claremont Colleges Library. For more than ten years, library staff has been assisting Seniors with posting their undergraduate theses as a part of the ETD program, and they are some of the most downloaded items numbering in the 300,000-plus range. Theses are accessible via Open access and on the Campuses only. This poster will share some challenges in hosting and posting workflows for students, policies, and procedures for library staff and our campus …

Endogenous Preferences: A Challenge To Constitutional Political Economy's Normative Foundation?, Malte Dold

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

This paper starts with the observation from behavioral economics that preferences are endogenous, i.e., they are unstable, context-dependent, and open to processes of adaptation. It then asks whether welfare analysis and normative economics are still possible in a world populated by people with endogenous preferences. In particular, it looks at recent proposals by Viktor Vanberg and Carl Christian von Weizsacker. In highlighting an institutional perspective, both can be seen as proponents of modern ordoliberalism and both claim that their approaches can deal with the issue of endogenous preferences in a more coherent way than approaches that remain within the mind …

Synthesis Of 2-Arylpyridines By The Suzuki–Miyaura Cross-Coupling Of Pyfluor With Hetero (Aryl) Boronic Acids And Esters, Juan Rueda-Espinosa, Dewni Ramanayake, Nicholas Ball, Jennifer A. Love

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

The Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling of pyridine-2-sulfonyl fluoride (PyFluor) with hetero(aryl) boronic acids and pinacol boronic esters is reported. The reactions can be performed using Pd(dppf)Cl2 as the catalyst, at temperatures between 65 and 100 °C and in the presence of water and oxygen. This transformation generates 2-arylpyridines in modest to good yields (5%–89%).

Behavioural Normative Economics: Foundations, Approaches And Trends, Malte Dold

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

This article summarises the theoretical foundations, main approaches and current trends in the field of behavioural normative economics. It identifies bounded rationality and bounded willpower as the two core concepts that have motivated the field. Since the concepts allow for individual preferences to be context-dependent and time-inconsistent, they pose an intricate problem for standard welfare analysis. The article discusses the ways in which two prominent approaches - the preference purification approach and the opportunity approach - have tackled the problem. It argues that shortcomings in each of these approaches motivate an agency-centric perspective. The article presents two concrete policy proposals …

Don’T Close The Book On Print: Mid-Term Return On Investment Of Print Books Purchased Under Different Acquisition Modes, Maria Savova, Candace Lebel

Library Staff Publications and Research

Five years ago we conducted a study on short-term return on investment in print books purchased under different acquisition modes. Unsurprisingly, the demand-driven purchases - and course readings in particular - showed the highest level of engagement and return on investment within the first year after purchase. Approximately a third of all titles purchased on approval and as firm orders also saw at least one use in the first year, and the titles that were used experienced an average of 2.5 circulations.

These results triggered some follow-up questions which we can now address with five years of additional data. Do …

Regular Solutions To Elliptic Equations, Alfonso Castro, Jon T. Jacobsen

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

A review of results and techniques on the existence of regular radial solutions to second order elliptic boundary value problems driven by linear and quasilinear operators is presented. Of particular interest are results where the solvability of a given elliptic problem can be analyzed by the relationship between the spectrum of the operator and the behavior of the nonlinearity near infinity and at zero. Energy arguments and Pohozaev type identities are used extensively in that analysis. An appendix with a proof of the contraction mapping principle best suited for using continuous dependence to ordinary differential equations on initial conditions is …

An Undergraduate Consortium For Addressing The Leaky Pipeline To Computing Research, James C. Boerkoel Jr., Mehmet Ergezer

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Despite an increasing number of successful interventions designed to broaden participation in computing research, there is still significant attrition among historically marginalized groups in the computing research pipeline. This experience report describes a first-of-its-kind Undergraduate Consortium (UC; https://aaai-uc.github.io/about) that addresses this challenge by empowering students with a culmination of their undergraduate research in a conference setting. The UC, conducted at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), aims to broaden participation in the AI research community by recruiting students, particularly those from historically marginalized groups, supporting them with mentorship, advising, and networking as an accelerator toward graduate school, AI research, …

Roles, Responsibilities, And Decision-Making Power In Collection Development, Maria Savova

Library Staff Publications and Research

Our Library’s approach to collection development has evolved over time. Subject Liaisons no longer have assigned budget funds for each subject area, but instead work with consolidated discipline budgets within disciplinary teams to select books and make recommendations for larger purchases. These contributions to collection development are done in close collaboration with Collections Librarians and staff and in addition to Subject Liaisons' instruction, research support, and outreach responsibilities.

In addition to maintaining subscriptions and regular book purchasing, each year the Library selects larger and/or ongoing resources for acquisition from a long list of options accumulated through faculty and student requests, …

Stable Trace Ideals And Applications, Haydee Lindo, Hai Long Dao

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

We study stable trace ideals in one dimensional local Cohen–Macaulay rings and give numerous applications.

William Honnold And Pomona’S Legacy Of Colonial Exploitation, Arenaria Cramer

2023 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research Award

Research into the William L Honnold papers, housed in Special Collections at the Claremont Colleges Honnold-Mudd Library, reveals Pomona Colleges legacy of reliance on colonial mining projects in Southern Africa and North America.

La Sagrada Medicina De La Madre Tierra: Traditional Ancestral Preservation In Pomona, Ca Community Gardens, Lizbeth Valdivia-Jauregui

2023 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research Award

For thousands of years before colonization, Indigenous ancestral knowledge has preserved, honored, and nurtured the sacredness of Mother Earth through kin-based institutions knitted together in a cosmic web of lineages and tribes (Henrich, 2020). The purpose of this grounded theory community-centered study was to examine how traditional ancestral knowledge is transmitted within community gardens in the city of Pomona, CA. Participants (N = 16) were interviewed using open-ended qualitative interviews that followed Charmaz’s (2014) constructivist grounded theory framework, in order to explore participants’ perspectives and personal experiences in possibly viewing community gardens as spaces of cultural transmission (Charmaz, 2014). …

Community, Capitalism, And Oxycontin: A Holistic Examination Of The Opioid Crisis, Camile Bernard

2023 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research Award

My research investigates the Opioid Crisis and argues that to get at the root of the problem we need to target the unequal competitive nature of American life. I suggest that an important step towards remedy is the reimplantation of the local community in neighborhoods.

Warren County Democrats: The Urban And Rural Divide, Aidan Henrikson

2023 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research Award

This paper examines the internal party dynamics of the Warren Democratic Party in Upstate New York. The county comprises the city of Glens Falls and the rural townships around Lake George in the Adirondacks. The Warren County Democrats' over emphasis on national and state politics, and overrepresentation of certain populations like the teacher’s union, rather than their locality, leads it to neglect and alienate its rural communities and hence party support.

The Gendered Semiotics Of Far-Right Populism On Instagram: A Case From Spain, David Divita

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Perhaps more than any other online social-networking platform, Instagram facilitates the construction and management of public image, serving as a potentially effective tool for political actors; nevertheless, it remains relatively understudied among digital communication strategies. In this article, I investigate the platform’s use by far-right populist politicians, turning to Santiago Abascal of Spain as a case study. Performing detailed analysis on a corpus of Abascal’s most popular posts determined by their “engagement rate,” I expose the gendered mode of self-presentation that resonates with Abascal’s public. In the second part of the article, I consider an equivalent corpus from President Pedro …

Calcium Bistriflimide-Mediated Sulfur (Vi)–Fluoride Exchange (Sufex): Mechanistic Insights Toward Instigating Catalysis, Nicholas Ball, Brian Han, Samuel R. Khasnavis, Matthew Nwerem, Michael Bertagna, O Maduka Ogba

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

We report a mechanistic investigation of calcium bistriflimide-mediated sulfur(VI)–fluoride exchange (SuFEx) between sulfonyl fluorides and amines. We determine the likely pre-activation resting state─a calcium bistriflimide complex with ligated amines─thus allowing for corroborated calculation of the SuFEx activation barrier at ∼21 kcal/mol, compared to 21.5 ± 0.14 kcal/mol derived via kinetics experiments. Transition state analysis revealed: (1) a two-point calcium-substrate contact that activates the sulfur(VI) center and stabilizes the leaving fluoride and (2) a 1,4-diazabicyclo[2.2.2]octane additive that provides Brønsted-base activation of the nucleophilic amine. Stable Ca–F complexes upon sulfonamide formation are likely contributors to inhibited catalytic turnover, and a proof-of-principle redesign …

Covid-19, Crowdedness, And Cmc Dining: An Agent-Based Model Approach To Reducing The Spread Of Covid-19, Reia Li, Ruth Efe, Zintan Mwinila-Yuori

2022 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research Award

To make a COVID-safe return to in-person learning in the fall 2021 semester, Claremont McKenna College (CMC) created a new outdoor dining option to decrease the number of students inside the dining hall at one time: food trucks. However, crowding often occurs at both the inside and outside dining options. And so, we constructed an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to simulate the flow of students to the dining options over the lunch time hours. We use our ABM to investigate when over the lunch period crowding occurs and how often both or either option is crowded. Our analysis examines three different …

The Periodic Table Of Women Of Color In Stem, Ella Wasson

2022 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research Award

This research project analyzes the resistance and resilience of women of color in fields of STEM by exploring three themes. The first theme investigates the historic and ongoing systemic barriers women of color face. The second theme reveals the erasure and exploitation of women of color, highlighting the testimonies and experiences of real women of color in STEM. The third theme explores possible solutions to increase the accessibility and inclusivity of STEM. This project was exhibited on an interactive physical poster, the images of which are embedded throughout.

Tales Of Urban Livability－Vermont Avenue In Los Angeles As Told By Tree Canopy Cover, Hoi Cheng Wong

2022 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research Award

This thesis project explored tree canopy cover (TCC) as an indicator for walkability and disinvestment in pedestrian infrastructure and urban livability in the City of Los Angeles (LA). The project consisted of three main components. The first component of the project is composed of a literature review on the scientific importance and economic value of TCC along with a brief overview of the history of redlining in LA. This section is followed by an analysis of the demographics of LA residents in correlation to tree canopy data, which was completed with GIS mapping. The last major component of the project …

The Formation Of Protective Relationships Between Service Workers And Customers, Ernesto Fraga

2022 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research Award

Abstract:

This study explores the understudied experiences of service workers in elite settings, in this case, at a private elite college in the United States. I analyzed data collected from participant observations and from nine in-depth interviews with dining hall staff and housekeepers. I focus on the formation of what I call protective relationships among workers and students & faculty to shed light on how this dynamic is unique to elite private colleges. Protective relationships refer to the “social shields” that students and faculty bring to workers against injustices in the workplace. The analysis shows that while such relationships are …

Prometheus: The Timeless Symbol Of Enlightenment, Paloma Garcia

2022 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research Award

No abstract provided.

Reading As Resistance: Representations Of Indigeneity In Twentieth Century American Children’S Literature, Isabel Evans

2022 Claremont Colleges Library Undergraduate Research Award

My research investigates representations of Indigeneity in twentieth century American children’s literature. As part of my methodology, I examined children’s books that include Indigenous characters or iconography, like feather headdresses or moccasins, coded as “Indian” in the dominant American imagination. This enabled me to interrogate hegemonic understandings of the “Indian” among non-Native people in the United States, who, until mid-century, saw Indigenous peoples, paradoxically, as both non-human threats to American progress and as the “first Americans.” These assumptions permeated popular children’s books like Two Little Savages (1903) and Little Leo (1951), which both present the “Indian” as an identity that …