Digital Commons Network^™

Philosophy By The Pint, Kyle Robert Quinn

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

The Propagation And Proliferation Of The Greek Ideal: From Antiquity To Winckelmann, Halina Cecily Piasecki

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Donald Trump And The Spectacle Of The Modern American Presidency, Medora Mcdougall Jones

Senior Projects Spring 2018

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States. A former reality TV star with no prior political experience, his ascendance to most powerful position in American government shocked the country. News outlets and political analysts portrayed him as an unprecedented outlier, describing his demagogic appeals and grand gestures as anomalies detached from the typical features of presidential leadership. Yet, Donald Trump is not a glitch in the American political system, but rather a unique manifestation of the qualities inherent to the spectacular status of the modern presidency. His rise to the Oval …

Towards Improving Learning With Consumer-Grade, Closed-Loop, Electroencephalographic Neurofeedback, Zall Soren Hirschstein

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Learning is an enigmatic process composed of a multitude of cognitive systems that are functionally and neuroanatomically distinct. Nevertheless, two undeniable pillars which underpin learning are attention and memory; to learn, one must attend, and maintain a representation of, an event. Psychological and neuroscientific technologies that permit researchers to “mind-read” have revealed much about the dynamics of these distinct processes that contribute to learning. This investigation first outlines the cognitive pillars which support learning and the technologies that permit such an understanding. It then employs a novel task—the amSMART paradigm—with the goal of building a real-time, closed-loop, electroencephalographic (EEG) neurofeedback …

(Ab)Normality, Adolescence And The Politics Of Need Interpretation In Three American Sex Education Programs, Analiese R. Dorff

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Automation & Artificial Intelligence: Transforming The Us Labor Market & Worsening Income Inequality, David Isaac Schlosser

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Who Was The Man In Mexico? The Degree To Which The Mexican State Enjoyed Autonomy And Sovereignty With Respect To Its National And International Relationships From 1958 To 1964, Sebastian Carrasco

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Energy Transition In Saudi Arabia: Oil, Solar And Vision, Zak William Rawle

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

The Unveiling Of Us, Alexis Parra

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The Unveiling of Us is an affirmation by, of and for wom^n of color. In this collaboration, we - subject and photographer - seek to reclaim the performance, production and beauty of individual identities that are informed by collective pasts. Everyday acts of performance are emphasized in these images through objects and gestures that reference the day to day practices of black and brown wom^n based on our histories, our cultures and our senses of self. This is our space to claim: the viewer looks, but the subjects hold the gaze as they declare power through a notion of beauty. …

Devorah, Jackson Siegal

Senior Projects Spring 2018

In Devorah, I sought to deliver an image to a text I could only engage with through removal. Unable to read the original Yiddish memoir written by my great grandmother, Devorah Schneider, I relied on a translation. Upon realizing that a photograph of the world couldn’t properly illustrate the experiences I was reading, I decided to expose photographic paper beneath an empty enlarger, one with no negative. As the blank projections bled, grew, shrunk and glowed in my darkroom, I began to build an abstract language in dialogue with Devorah’s words.

The project began when I decided to engage with …

The Estate, Henry Hardcastle Smythe

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Heaven On A Bun, Eleanor Gibney

Senior Projects Spring 2018

We are told from a young age, how to act, what is polite, what is acceptable; we start living within restrictions, within boundaries. This causes our conversations to become limited and our interactions tense. To escape from these restrictions we escape to our thoughts, our own private haven where judgment is not passed.

In this project, I explore a world of my creation where the space between our physical world and mental world is bent, or in other words, the bending of fantasy and reality. Being placed in the middle of this other world, things and interactions don’t seem quite …

Practicing Engagement, Isabella Powers Yannoni

Senior Projects Spring 2018

For this project I lead two rehearsal processes with peers, and a movement class for middle schoolers, all of which centered around engagement. I have investigated how my own and others’ engagement can contribute to a rich experience for participants and observers, using collaborative games and storytelling as a means of working with these ideas. I believe in the power of questioning together, as opposed to determining alone. Throughout these processes, we, the participants, have learned from each other and have had to re-negotiate our roles and responsibilities to the work as well as to each other.

Dancing with people …

Pretty Young Host, Maria Isabelle Filippa Olsson Skalin

Senior Projects Spring 2018

“Pretty Young Host” is largely inspired by my upbringing in a society that impresses a sense of normalcy, bordering on necessity for women to have children in order to live happily. This societal pressure has led to my fascination with the Western world’s consumption and production of women as “fertile bodies”, including pro-natalist advertising and media that specifically targets women. I was both interested in and horrified by television commercials of life-like baby dolls for young girls, teaching them from a young age to learn how to raise and care for a child, as well as some advertising in recent …

Losing Shahrazad: A Distant Reading Of 1001 Nights, Taysa Mohler

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project is a distant reading analysis of seven 19th and 20th-century English translations of One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights. Through the use of computer programming and distant reading, it becomes clear that the Nights' frame tale is the carrier of the internal logic and generative power of the story cycle. Further, the frame tale expresses the Nights' self-representation, which serves to undermine the historical use of the Nights as synecdoche for the Orient. Therefore, the translators that remove the frame story from their versions further the Nights' use as an Orientalist object, …

What's The Problem With Noumenal Affection?, Leonardo Mugi Santoso

Senior Projects Spring 2018

According to transcendental idealism, our experience of the empirical world is the result of our minds being causally affected by supersensible things in themselves; however, transcendental idealism also holds that things in themselves are unknowable by us. The seeming incompatibility of these two claims is known as legendary 'problem of noumenal affection.' This problem has led many scholars to conclude that Kant's theory is inconsistent. In this project I offer a new diagnosis of the problem by reexamining the supposedly incompatible components: The doctrines of noumenal affection and noumenal ignorance. I argue that there are philosophical and textual worries surrounding …

From The Headwaters To The Bay: Stories Of The Saw Kill, Tierney Jo Belle Weymueller

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Is There Joy Beyond The Joystick?: Immersive Potential Of Brain-Computer Interfaces, Elias Solomon Posen

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Immersion, the state of being fully engaged in one's current operation, is a descriptor commonly used to appraise user experience in computer games and software applications. As the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) begins to expand into the consumer sphere, questions arise concerning the ability of BCIs to modulate user immersion. This study employed a computer game to examine the effect of a consumer-grade BCI (the Emotiv EPOC) on immersion. In doing so, this study also explored the relationship between BCI usability and immersion levels. An experiment with twenty-seven participants showed that users were significantly more immersed when controlling the …

Guided By Physicians: Pío Baroja's Intersection Between Literature And Medicine In El Árbol De La Ciencia, Emmett Koltun Dienstag

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project seeks to explore the thematic unity of Pío Baroja's medical experience with his literary work El árbol de la ciencia.

A Mere Heart Of Stone: The Anti-Biography Of Charles Darwin, Anna Rose Sones

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Written Arts Program

The Fungus Among Us: The Effect Of Copper Fungicide On Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi And Implications For Sustainable Agricultural Systems, Francois J. Hartnett

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

The Politics Of Distinction And Exchange In Displacement: How Aesthetics Become Ethical, Joy Huda Al-Nemri

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

East Meets West: A Comparative Study On The Origin Of Landscape Depiction, Conghao Tian

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project examines the origin and evolution of landscape depictions from both Eastern and Western traditions, covering from Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) to Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) in China, and from Roman antiquity to early Renaissance in Europe. Landscape depiction from each time period is examined. With the help of detailed visual analysis and overviews of religious ideology, the study reaches the conclusion that in both traditions, landscape depiction reaches its maturity both in terms of pictorial techniques and the ability to convey spirituality by the early Renaissance (11th century in China and 15th century in Italy). The project …

Turned On: An Exploration Of Intimacy In The Age Of Technology., Franchesca Breanna Chorengel

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Don't Take This Personally: Sentiment Analysis For Identification Of "Subtweeting" On Twitter, Noah L. Segal-Gould

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The purpose of this project is to identify subtweets. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "subtweet" as a "[Twitter post] that refers to a particular user without directly mentioning them, typically as a form of furtive mockery or criticism." This paper details a process for gathering a labeled ground truth dataset, training a classifier, and creating a Twitter bot which interacts with subtweets in real time. The Naive Bayes classifier trained in this project classifies tweets as subtweets and non-subtweets with an average F1 score of 72%.

Victorious Athena: The Cult And The Temple Of Athena Nike, Brynlie-Sage Johnston

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Plantain Stain, Loreli Mojica

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Could The Global Health Secuirty Agenda Actually Protect Americans From Emerging Diseases?, Shannon Taylor Dixon

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This senior project aims to challenge the traditional thinking of public health. My inspiration from this topic simply comes from my interest in bettering global health for all people. With an ever shifting political and social environment, this paper strives to seek the most successful strategies in combating infectious diseases. By using three prominent and global infectious diseases, Ebola, Zika and Influenza, this paper analyzes the failures and successes of international support and response teams. This paper also uses the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) as a foundation to analyze and support the claim that successful global health interventions are …

Knowing Water: Science And The Politics Of Knowledge Production Along The Saw Kill, Carlo Diego Raimondo

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Beginning with globally oriented ideological constructions of water as resource, this project explores the materiality of water and how it comes to understood within our current geological era. Specifically exploring the politics of scientific knowledge production, I follow the methodological processes of the Bard Water Lab as they monitor water quality of a local stream, exploring how different apparatuses of observation are utilized in order to make a stream a legible and knowable object.

129 Home Ave., Ella Whittemore Hill

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Walking through my childhood home late at night, half asleep with my eyes barely open, I was always able to navigate myself around every corner, down every hallway, and past every creak in the floor. The muscle memory of this house, which I left behind long ago, continues to live within my body. Memory becomes faint over time; it changes and evolves, but it never disappears. Rather, it matures from the physical specificity of being in a house to being the stories of that house. When my mother moved out a few years ago (a move which I was unable …