Digital Commons Network^™

As You Were Sleeping, Nora Yamazaki Heineman

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

A Deep Learning Agent For Games With Hidden Information, Robert A. Mills

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The goal of this project is to develop an agent capable of playing a particular game at an above average human level. In order to do so we investigated reinforcement and deep learning techniques for making decisions in discrete action spaces with hidden information. The methods we used to accomplish this goal include a standard word2vec implementation, an alpha-beta minimax tree search, and an LSTM network to evaluate game states. Given just the rules of the game and a vector representation of the game states, the agent learned to play the game by competitive self play. The emergent behavior from …

The Specter Of Caste, Kabir Raj Khanna

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

A Womb With A View, Briauna Marie Falk

Senior Projects Spring 2018

I found my mother’s pregnancy diary when I was 12. The diary presents not only the story of my origin, but also the story of how my biological father left my mother. The diary gave me insight into what unfolded while I was growing inside her, and yet, many questions still remain unanswered. I have heard that trauma experienced by the mother is felt in utero alongside her – I worry one of the first feelings I felt was true sadness. Ideally the diary could answer my unresolved questions, but instead I am left to my imagination. The diary cannot …

Newsroom Action During The Lebanon War: A Look At American And Israeli Media Coverage, Ciara Collins

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Since 1948, the birth of the Jewish state has been broadcasted by news media outlets all over the globe. Most audiences and viewers are driven by an ideological bias, one that influences the daily consumption of media, impeccably catered to the viewer and their political, social, and moral understandings. This paper explores biases embedded within Israeli and Western news industries through literature, news stations, and language. I will unpack these biases in media representation with concern to the hierarchical structures that exist behind the unquestioned voices or “factual” sources. Israel has been viewed and criticized as a modern Nation-State by …

Greedy Bastards, Nathaniel Vergoz Carlsen

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

The Murdering Mother: The Making And Unmaking Of Medea In Ancient Greek Image And Text, Madison Skye Lauber

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Place Accumulation: Kingston/Ulster, Callan F. Fish

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Since February 2018, I’ve been listening and recording around Kingston and the town of Ulster; synthesizing interviews, bird song, passing cars, protests, conflict, unique perspectives and oral histories, meetings, optimisms, water, as part of a project called, Place Accumulation: Kingston/Ulster. Using the Dynamic Listening Instrument, an interactive sound sculpture which uses a venn-diagram of electromagnetic fields to allow sounds to be handled as a tactile entity and bended dynamically, sounds are arranged and dispersed back into different locations and events in Kingston. Using a sounding bucket, people in Kingston can listen in, re-arrange, explore, and play with sounds from their …

"The Brain - Is Wider Than The Sky -" Notes Of Life, On Learning And Language, Anne M. Burnett

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

The Motivations And Effects Of The Nba Salary Cap, Jeffrey M. Goldrosen

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The National Basketball Association’s (NBA) use of a salary cap to restrict player salaries and team payrolls is commonly seen in other professional sports leagues throughout the world, but it is unique in many ways which affect its efficiency in achieving its alleged purposes. Introduced in 1984, the salary cap was supposed to help the league restore competitive balance, as it theoretically would have prevented wealthier teams from overspending and dominating the less wealthy teams. As time has passed, it has become evident that competitive balance was not achieved following the adoption of the salary cap, and it has been …

A Great Negative Work Of Destruction: 20th Century Avant Garde And The Reimagination Of Novelty, Alexander V. Hall

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project traces the thread of novelty through three avant garde movements. It discusses their posterity through time, and addresses the various shapes which novelty takes throughout the 20th century.

"Poetry Is Not A Luxury:" Dis-Ing Self, Dis-Ing Archive, Ehm West

Senior Projects Spring 2018

‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury:’ Dis-ing Self, Dis-sing Archive,” is divided into three separate interrogations of such rts institutions, archives, and constructions of identity. Each chapter explores how these related categories are challenged by curators, artists and artists’ respective styles or forms. My central focus investigates the use of paraficition and disidentification in Cheryl Dunye's work. In both her early video works and first feature-length film The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye investigates the complexity of her own Black lesbian identity and the constructedness of identity as a whole. She begins her practice as a moving image artist during a …

Speaking The Unspeakable: Armenian Women’S Fiction Generations After Genocide, Elena Lucine Lefevre

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

For The Intruder In My Home, Bennett Chinsena

Senior Projects Spring 2018

A collection of lyric, prose, and experimental poetry.

"Becoming" David Foster Wallace: Media, Metafiction, And Miscommunication, Gordon Hugh Willis Iv

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Neural Network Reconstruction Via Graph Locality-Driven Machine Learning, Hayden Sehon Sartoris

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

From Lucky Strike To Chunghwa: The Development Of China’S Tobacco Industry In The Twentieth Century, Yi Chen

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Blackish: Afrolatinidad And Dominican Identity In Nyc, Salim Elias Chagui-Sanchez

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

The Mathematics Of Cancer: Fitting The Gompertz Equation To Tumor Growth, Dyjuan Tatro

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Mathematical models are finding increased use in biology, and partuculary in the field of cancer research. In relation to cancer, systems of differential equations have been proven to model tumor growth for many types of cancer while taking into account one or many features of tumor growth. One feature of tumor growth that models must take into account is that tumors do not grow exponentially. One model that embodies this feature is the Gomperts Model of Cell Growth. By fitting this model to long-term breast cancer study data, this project ascertains gompertzian parameters that can be used to predicts tumor …

Homeomorphisms Of The Sierpinski Carpet, Karuna S. Sangam

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The Sierpinski carpet is a fractal formed by dividing the unit square into nine congruent squares, removing the center one, and repeating the process for each of the eight remaining squares, continuing infinitely many times. It is a well-known fractal with many fascinating topological properties that appears in a variety of different contexts, including as rational Julia sets. In this project, we study self-homeomorphisms of the Sierpinski carpet. We investigate the structure of the homeomorphism group, identify its finite subgroups, and attempt to define a transducer homeomorphism of the carpet. In particular, we find that the symmetry groups of platonic …

Signor Mio Carissimo: A Theatrical Analysis And Translation Of Michelangelo’S Love Letters To Tommaso Dei Cavalieri, Miles Edmonds Messinger

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Ubi Bene, Ibi Patria - The Identities, Displacements, And Homelands Of The Juifs D’Algérie, Britt Shacham

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Inverted Pyramid This Earth, Maggie Louisa Zavgren

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Reflections On "The Dreamer Examines His Pillow" - Scene 1, Alexander Mckerrow Cowley Glass

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations With Few Generator Points, Kirill Shakhnovskiy

Senior Projects Spring 2018

A Voronoi tessellation with $n$ generator points is the partitioning of a bounded region in $\rr^2$ into polygons such that every point in a given polygon is closer to its generator point than to any other generator point. A centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) is a Voronoi tessellation where each polygon’s generator point is also its center of mass. In this project I will demonstrate what kinds of CVTs can exists within specific parameters, such as a square or rectangular region, and a set number generator points. I will also prove that the examples I present are the only CVTs that …

Interview Magazine: Art & Fame, Josephine G. Danziger

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The world today is radically different from the world of the 1960s. Andy Warhol was the pinnacle of Pop, and print publications were supreme in the industry of news and fashion alike. What was Pop culture in 1969 seems foreign and antiquated today, and yet there are similarities to be drawn between the era of mod and the modern era.

In the research paper Interview Magazine: Art & Fame, I aim to explore the connection between the artistic excellence that launched the publication’s success and the obsession with celebrity that charged its passion — a bond that formed to …

Documenting "Documenta": Decoding And Recoding The History Of An Exhibition In 1955, 2002, And 2017, Nicola Susanna Koepnick

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

The Poem Will Resemble You: A Human-Computer Collaboration, Zoe M. Morgan-Weinman

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Shanghai Made: The Trade Off Between Global Transformation And Social Equity In A Chinese City., Nikhil Amar Inalsingh

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

House God, Geneva Zane

Senior Projects Spring 2018

A study of faith and its many forms, ranging from the faith a child has in dreams to the God like status of a writer and Their creation.