Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Through The Lens Of Time: Capturing The Ephemeral Magic Of The Circus, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Images in the Charles Clarke Circus Photographs Collection document the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in the 1920s. Clarke, a leaper in the world-renowned aerial act, The Clarkonians, would have been in a relatively unique position to capture views of the circus from the vantage point of an insider. The resulting images carry the weight of that perspective. The photographs document important aspects of the circus, showing performers like Lillian Leitzel and May Wirth, spectacle wardrobe, practices and performances in the ring, and quieter moments behind the big top.

The images document a particular point in time, freezing …

Understanding, Incentivizing, And Supporting Openness In Music Librarianship, Stephanie Bonjack, Michael Duffy, Rachel E. Scott

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OER) present great opportunities to music librarians and the communities they serve. There are nonetheless considerable challenges in understanding the models associated with both and determining how best to approach them at one’s library. This presentation offers an overview of OA and OER landscapes, outlining prominent models and key players, and also provides case studies of an institutional OER incentive program, a collaboration with an institutional Office of Research to support OA, and a comparison of OER and traditional/fee-based textbooks in music theory. By offering an overview and examples of OA and OER …

Performing A Comeback: Assessing The Biography Of Alma Mahler Via Youtube Performances, Rachel E. Scott

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

The life and work of many nineteenth-century women composers cannot be satisfactorily studied or understood due to a lack of documentary evidence. In the case of Alma Mahler, however, it is not a lack of manuscript materials or biographical accounts that preclude the appraisal of her legacy, but rather the sheer volume and often contradictory nature of accounts. Although her early life writing emphasized the importance of music, she later downplayed her identity as a composer and emphasized her role of patron of the arts and muse to “great men.” I would argue, however, that if biography is a tool …

Open Access, Anne Shelley, Rachel E. Scott

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

[Conclusion] While the embrace of Open Access within music scholarship and librarianship has been somewhat spotty and circumstantial to date, there are some patterns to celebrate. Music librarians have collaborated with stakeholders to create a number of high-value and openly-licensed online collections, libraries and publishers are exploring models that will better fund OA research by arts and humanities scholars, professional societies are responding to members’ prompts and formalizing their support through new OA publications, and the increased incorporation of linked open data standards will better connect information that was once siloed. It is challenging to predict the state of the …

Every Good Belletrist Deserves Funding: Arts And Humanities Scholars And Open Access Publishing Fees, Anne Shelley, Rachel E. Scott, Ana Dubnjakovic

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

We undertook this project to learn more about the Open Access experiences of scholars working outside of the sciences, with an emphasis on any related payments and funding sources. In addition to gaining insight into arts and humanities scholars’ engagement with Open Access publishing, we also seek to tease out some of the intersections of privilege, affiliation, disciplinarity, and publishing that are not yet well-documented in the literature.

In addition, we will consider the significance of our findings for librarians who support scholars in the arts and humanities, including but not limited to collection development implications for subscription journals with …

Contextualizing Performers In Circus Route Books: Linked Data Entities And Open Data, Angela Yon

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

The presentation will discuss the final phase of the 4-year project Step Right Up: Digitizing Over 100 Years of Circus Route Books made possible by the Digitizing Hidden Collections program, a national grant competition administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources and supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This segment of the project concentrated on making data open and reusable to aid in optimal discoverability and create data relationships with the collection. The culmination of these efforts resulted in the digital humanities project, Agency through Otherness: Portraits of Performers in Circus Route Books 1875-1925. This exhibition …

Betrayed By The Bibliographic Record: How Catalogs Construct Authorship And Constrain Their Own Authority, Rachel E. Scott

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This cautionary tale outlines how a librarian with an understanding of and respect for cataloging processes was the perfect candidate to be duped by a false attribution in a bibliographic record. In the process of compiling a list of compositions attributed to Alma Mahler for my dissertation, I encountered a handful of works not yet addressed in the scholarship on her compositional work. Despite numerous red flags, and much to my detriment, I invested a great deal in one of these unqualified and unsubstantiated attributions that turned out to be false. In the wake of this false attribution, I have …

Layer Upon Layer: Starting Small, Thinking Big, And Building Sustainable Digital Projects, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

While many digital scholarship tools and computational methods can play an important role in digital humanities research at all stages, it’s usually the final output that is the most visible element of these projects. This talk will explore exhibits built using the Omeka platform with a particular focus on incorporating the Neatline plugin to create interactive maps. Continuing with maps, we will look at some possibilities for including these in projects built using the Scalar platform. We will also talk more generally about getting started with digital humanities projects and planning for sustainability.

Underpinnings And Equal Terms: Using An Exhibit As An Entry Point For Engaging Undergraduate Students In The Research Process, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Studying exhibits offers students many entry points for critically evaluating information and images. They are also effective tools for engaging students in research to better understand how to refine their research questions and construct compelling narratives. This poster focuses on the use of the online women’s suffrage themed exhibit Underpinnings and Equal Terms to teach undergraduate students visual and information literacy skills and engage them in archival research. Using this exhibit curated from archival and special collections materials as a starting point, students in an introductory Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course explored how the overarching theme and subnarratives were …

Sideshow Sounds: Black Bandleaders Respond To Exoticism, Elizabeth C. Hartman, Angela Yon

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Everyone knows P. G. Lowery, broadcaster of African-American music. Less known are those whose sideshow leadership predates that of Lowery. The pioneering entrepreneurial-entertainment legacy of bandleaders like Solomon P. White, J. 0. McNutt, and James Wolfscale set the stage for Lowery's phenomenal success. This presentation investigates their personal histories in the context of mainstream and circus cultures; their indispensable contribution to the success of the circus and the popularization of African-American music; and their role as the sinew of African-American communities through newspaper distribution and correspondence.

Black sideshow bands-first documented in 1881 within Milner Library's Circus Route Books Digital Collection, …

Native Performance And Agency In The Wild West Show, Mariah Wahl, Angela Yon

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

"The Wild West" has been romanticized and criticized as historical American trope. Much of this idea is based on the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill, Pawnee Bill, and other traveling circus shows throughout the late 19th and early 20th century. Often these shows functioned as propaganda for American imperialism, condoning and perpetuating cultural genocide against Native American populations.

The presentation will use autobiographical information to explore how many Native American Wild West performances and exhibits worked subversively to critique racist American institutions. Exhibits like the 1904 World's Fair placed Native performers of the Wild West show in stark contrast …

Gathering Online: Leveraging Tools For Instruction And Group Work In The Classroom And Beyond, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This talk focused on the librarian-led activities for the course Community Engagement Seminar, highlighting collaboration, teaching and learning, outcomes, and other uses of Scalar. This course focused on ways that K-12 school personnel create successful learning environments. Incorporating mapping, data visualization, and digital publishing, we taught students how to use several online tools and create a Scalar book that presented their research. Through a mixture of Zoom instructional sessions and personalized consultations, we helped students use Scalar to collaborate with their group members and build skills to successfully communicate goals, strategies, and outcomes to a broader community.

We also focused …

Curators And Active Participants: Archives, Exhibits, Engagement, And Outreach Through Teaching, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This presentation focuses on how a set of digital humanities workshops offered to university faculty helped them incorporate new resources and methods into their teaching. The first workshop was an overview of digital tools that focused on getting started without feeling overwhelmed, ways to incorporate art and archival resources into projects, and approaches to facilitating meaningful experiences in the classroom. The second workshop refined this material by focusing on how the same idea and content could be used to create three different digital humanities projects—a collection database and map, an online exhibit, and a digital publication. The exhibitions and digital …

Searching: Waves, Spencer Molnar

Theses and Dissertations

This supportive statement examines a philosophical conception of the self and how it can be identified through experience, consciousness, and perception by focusing on a human inclination to rationalize, or concretize, that which is everchanging. The methods of exploring this concept were achieved by examining the formal structure of composition and materials through the process of visual art. By pushing against historical traditions of creating spatial illusions in visual art, we can conclude that the legibility of an artwork is equally dependent on the experiential world as it is the social construction of image making. The question that is left …

Hor Bouks: Or, Her Book: Finding Women Readers, Writers, & Producers In Early Modern Literature, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

The impact of women on the history of literature can be difficult to track, but they made important contributions to writing, publishing, and collecting. This short talk focuses on works in the Rare and Fine Book Collection in the Milner Library Special Collections department, with a particular emphasis on the writer Lady Mary Wroth and the collector Frances Wolfreston. Wroth was the first Englishwoman to publish a complete sonnet sequence and an original work of prose fiction and Wolfreston is considered one of the first notable women book collectors.

Peering At The Mirror Of Reflection: Agency And Design Thinking In The Development Of Writerly Identities, Elizabeth Louise Jones

Theses and Dissertations

I have always valued reflection highly — as a means of developing as a writer and as a life practice — but I have been disappointed by the lack of thought resembling reflection when asking students to write about their writing practices. This dissertation presents the results of a grounded theory study of student reflective assignments through a direct analysis of the themes which emerge from a set of reflections from a course designed around the topic of games – primarily board, card, and video games. This study differs from much of the previous scholarship on reflection in composition in …

A World Grappling With Pope Francis: Laudato Si' And The Contested Frames Of A Secular-Minded Church, Joseph R. Blaney

Faculty Publications - Communications

Pope Francis has been misunderstood by liberals and conservatives alike, confusing an emphasized pastoral tone and approach for theological departure. This confusion is exacerbated in the United States where the faithful are tempted to understand and evaluate pastoral figures in terms of secular political ideologies. This study extends Blaney’s (2017) media framing study of news coverage of cardinalate appointments by examining commentary about the papal encyclical Laudato Si’ found among readers of the National Catholic Register, the National Catholic Reporter, and The New York Times. Thematic analyses affirm that the faithful of the U.S. church succumb to the same secular …

Collaboration In The Technical Communication Classroom: Negotiating Team Contracts In A Pwi, Alyssa Herman

Theses and Dissertations

As TPC teacher-scholars, we must acknowledge the overwhelming Whiteness of our field and the racism, ableism, and sexism inherent in our institutions. We must actively work toward inclusivity and socially just collaborations in our classrooms by encouraging dominant-identified students to confront their privileges and implicit biases in order to better engage with historically marginalized students. With that said, this thesis examines how teacher-scholars might take up a cultural-rhetorical approach to teaching TPC and how we might negotiate team contracts in PWIs. Firmly situated within the social justice turn, Herman draws from both feminist disability theory and critical race theory to …

“When Two Elephants Fight, It’S The Ground That Suffers ”: A Neo- Marxist Rhetorical Deconstruction Of The United States’ Rhetoric Of Power In Resistance To United Nations Treaties, Divine Narkotey Aboagye

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I present a Gramscian rhetorical reading of American antagonism to the International Criminal Court, a crucial agency of the UN. I probed the rhetoric of power in resistance concerning the discourse of international treaties by showing how both the United States and the United Nations have become global hegemons. From the foregoing, I uncover American resistance to the constitutive force of United Nations treaties by paying attention to post-Cold War American presidents. By using a neo-Marxist lens and analyzing a key foreign policy accord – the International Criminal Court – that spans the presidencies of Clinton, Bush, …

“Where Words Fail, Music Speaks ”: Emotion Regulation Strategies Using Music When Experiencing Sadness, Kendall M. Ladd

Theses and Dissertations

Past literature has suggested that individuals use the emotion regulation strategies of

catharsis, emotional support, understanding emotions, and mood congruency when deciding to listen to sad music when feeling sad (Friedman et al., 2012; Garrido & Schubert, 2013; Sedikides, 1992; Taylor & Friedman, 2015; van Goethem & Sloboda, 2011). This thesis sought to confirm this by comparing these four strategies to revival, another emotion regulation strategy that uses happy music instead of sad music.

The final sample of participants consisted of 122 undergraduate and graduate students at a Midwestern university. Participants completed questionnaires designed to measure how they typically regulate …

Sympathy For Cecil: Gender, Trophy Hunting, And The Western Environmental Imaginary, Eric S. Godoy

Faculty Publications - Philosophy

This article draws from political ecology and ecofeminism to examine sympathy, expressed by record-breaking donations from North Americans, for the death of Cecil the Lion. The overlapping normative critique offered by these two perspectives together demonstrates how sympathy is disclosive of power relations. Sympathy reveals, relies upon, and reinforces different forms of gender, racial, and neocolonial domination; especially when western sympathy remains ignorant of the power relations, including their politics and histories, that shape attitudes toward non-human animals and grant them status as members of the (western) moral community.

Need Fulfillment And Happiness In Botswana, Carolyn Moe

Theses and Dissertations

Happiness has been an important aspect of people’s lives spanning centuries and continents; as such, it is a widely researched area. A current prominent theory in happiness research is Needs Theory which has the premise that there are universal human needs and having these needs met would lead to a person’s happiness. Most often, the needs referenced are those presented by Abraham Maslow including needs of physiology, safety and security, love and belonging, esteem, knowing and understanding, aesthetics, self-actualization and transcendence. However, some studies have found that there are individuals who do not fit this theory either through having their …

Toward A Theory Of Procedural Rhetorical Systems: Demonstrations Of Player Agency In Uptake Of Rules In Video Games, Sydney A. Klem

Theses and Dissertations

This paper expands Ian Bogost’s (2007) procedural rhetoric by broadening the rhetorical view of games to encompass the arguments that they make not just about the material, but about themselves. The theory of procedural rhetorical systems (PRSes) views game systems as arguing toward how players should be following their rules, and like in any form of rhetoric, players possess agency in how they take up these arguments and how closely they follow rules. To demonstrate this, this paper analyzes a specific game, the 1996 platformer Super Mario 64, alongside various digital artifacts demonstrating how players have taken it up, including …

Inked Bodies, Blank Pages; A Study Of Amazigh Tattooing, Hannah Mesouani

Theses and Dissertations

The tradition of Moroccan Amazigh tattooing reflects the values and lived experiences of the communities that partake in this sacred practice. Adorning their fellow women with symbols of protection, tribe alliances and fertility, Amazigh women display their core values on face and body that come to represent their community. The power of these images and the women that wear them have stood the test of time, even in a newly male-dominated, Islamic Morocco that frowns upon body modification and promotes a nationalism that leaves little room for Amazigh tradition. In a corner of the world where literacy rates are low, …

"We Need To Stop Temporarily Caring: "Pulse, Spoken Word Poetry, And Audience Counter-Narrative Creation, Hannah G. Trew

Theses and Dissertations

On June 12, 2016, 49 people were killed, and 53 people were injured in a shooting at Pulse, a popular gay club in Orlando, Florida. The Pulse Nightclub shooting was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States at that time and the deadliest violent act against the LGBTQ+ community in the United States (Hancock & Haldeman, 2017; Jackson, 2017; Walter, Billard, & Murphy, 2017). The media were divided in labeling the shooting a terrorist attack or a hate crime, creating a master narrative surrounding the shooting. However, LGBTQ+ spoken word poets rejected the media’s storylines, developing counter-narratives, and instead …

Not All Wore Helmets: Preserving The Work Of Women In The 'Great War', April K. Anderson-Zorn

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Many stories told about the Great War are usually about the exploits of men. But what about the women who fought for justice and freedom? This article features three women who were once students of Illinois State Normal University: Ellen C. Babbit, Elizabeth Taylor Cleveland, and Ada Adcock. With original letters, photographs, and surveys sent by university librarian Angeline Vernon Milner, the war stories of three extraordinary women can are told to new generations.

‘Answering The Call’: Ange. V. Milner And Posters From The ‘Great War’, Angela L. Bonnell

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Illinois State University’s Milner Library is one of the few libraries in the nation possessing original posters produced during the First World War. It owes this distinction to the University’s first librarian, Angeline (known as Ange.) Vernon Milner. Milner preserved these posters after the war’s end, despite their original intent for a short-term, wartime-only purpose. As ephemera they were produced and distributed for public display and then meant to be discarded following the war. Milner preserved the posters recognizing their strong visual impact and value in illustrating a campus during wartime. Today these posters constitute the Answering the Call World …

#Digitalactivism: Examining #Yesallwomen And Teaching Social Media Activism In Technical Communication, Karishma Verma

Theses and Dissertations

In May 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured fourteen others near

the University of California campus in Santa Barbara. A “hatred of women” was cited as the

reason for his crimes. This incident inspired the hashtag movement #YesAllWomen on social

media. Users shared examples of how although “not all men” engage in violent behaviors that

Rodger exhibited, all women go through their lives fearing. This thesis uses a technofeminist

framework to examine how the #YesAllWomen movement functioned as an online social

movement on Twitter to encourage conversation as well as promote change. I also discuss how

technical …

Gender-Exclusive Language: Women’S Perception Of Linguistic Ostracism, Voice, And Power In Politics, Michelle Roxanne Grzybowski

Theses and Dissertations

Gender-exclusive language is a type of subtly sexist language that makes reference to a single gender group thereby excluding other gender groups (Stout & Dasgupta, 2011). Two studies examined how the use of gender-exclusive language impacts the experiences of women who were elected members of county boards. Specifically, the studies surveyed county board members in the states of Illinois and Wisconsin to determine whether the naturally occurring variation between the use of gender-exclusive language (e.g., using chairman to indicate both men and women) or gender-neutral language (e.g., chair or chairperson) was related to perceptions of ostracism and a sense of …

Mortuary Patterns In West-Central Tennessee: Contextualizing Historic Field Data From Nine Mississippian Period Sites, Brooke Adele Wamsley

Theses and Dissertations

Middle Mississippian is a both a cultural and temporal (1200 CE – 1400 CE) archaeological context of Midwestern North America. This cultural tradition is associated with mound building, specific art motifs, arguably stratified societies, intensive agriculture, and specific ritual/mortuary practices. Burial sites can be very valuable to archaeologists because of the purposeful interaction between the living and the deceased and reconstruct cultural elements such as social identity and group membership. While American archaeology continues to be fieldwork-focused, there are a considerable amount of cultural resources housed in museum collections that could provide data for research into pre-Columbian lifeways in North …