Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

We Can't Do It Alone: Collaborating Across Campus To Support Data Management, Cara Martin-Tetreault, Sue O'Dell, Barbara Levergood

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Meeting growing compliance requirements for researchers and institutions and providing the institutional resources and infrastructure within a liberal arts setting necessitates innovative collaborations and creative outreach. The presenters from the College’s Library and Office of Sponsored Research described how they work across departments to provide resources for data management, facilitate faculty understanding and compliance, and offer outreach. In addition, they led a discussion about how and where to start a cross-campus collaboration, the role of an institutional repository on a small campus, and lessons learned.

Free For All: Opening Collections And Supporting Multi-Institutional Efforts With Internet Archive, Patrick R. Wallace

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Patrick Wallace led a collaborative, information-sharing session on integrating Internet Archive (IA) into digital archive workflows and technical infrastructures. Key topics included how IA fits alongside other digital archive and repository platforms, using scripts & software to support batch processing and API interactions, and leveraging IA to help support coordinated digital preservation projects with smaller memory institutions.

Non-Algorithmic Inquiry In The Digital Age, Christopher Gilman, Jacob Alden Sargent

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

We notice, from our vantage point as alt-ac faculty who work in a digital scholarship center that students often confuse digital research with a rote process of “search and collect.” We propose that a successful deployment of undergraduate research at the course level requires a greater involvement from librarians in the design of the course structure and its assignments as well as greater intention from faculty in the curation of research materials. In this workshop we discuss case studies, present course design scenarios and suggest a collectively-developed protocol for working with faculty on courses involving class-wide research projects.

Building A Distributed Collaborative Model For Digital Scholarship Support At Liberal Arts Institutions, Iris Jastram, Austin Mason, Sarah D. Calhoun

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Much has been published on digital scholarship support models for large universities, but digital scholarship infrastructures for undergraduate colleges have received less attention in the literature. At Carleton College, we are in the process of developing a distributed collaborative model for support that involves librarians, academic technologists, faculty, undergraduate student workers, and other experts on campus. How can we capitalize on our unique institutional strengths as small liberal arts colleges while navigating the competing interests and expectations of diverse campus constituencies? This session allowed the participants to strategize and begin to build a framework for digital scholarship support at their …

Omeka Mania, Megan Mitchell

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

The number of students whose Omeka work is supported in some way by the Oberlin College Library has gone from 5 in the spring of 2013 to 145 in the 2015-2016 academic year. Learn how the library went from managing a handful of Omeka-based projects in a three year period to seven classes in one year, covering growing awareness of the Omeka platform on campus, faculty consultations, student training, documentation, peer student support, and more.

At The Intersection Of Technology And Special Collections: A Program Approach To Collaborative Teaching And Student Engagement, Benjamin Panciera, Rebecca Parmer

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Staff from the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives discussed their participation in a program to facilitate the introduction of new technologies into the classroom. In 2014-2015 they engaged two East Asian history courses in a project to digitize, transcribe, and annotate a 19th century journal detailing the voyage of a young man from Connecticut to Hong Kong. The project was selected as an ideal means to connect students with tools and techniques critical to primary source research and to use emerging technologies to bring archival resources to new audiences.

The Next Thousand Days: Planning For Digital Scholarship Engagement Into The Future, Kris Macpherson

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

A discussion that focused on the incorporation of digital scholarship into reference/research and instruction departments, including if/how our new undertakings broaden our mission and learning outcomes, our roles and job descriptions, and the ways we collaborate with other groups in our libraries, IT and across campus. How does the inclusion of DS in campus courses complement, incorporate or compete with information literacy? How do we see ourselves moving forward -- what are we adding and what are we dropping, and how are we retraining ourselves to incorporate digital scholarship into our programs?

Beyond Finding And Managing: Extending Research Data Services At Liberal Arts Institutions, Ryan Clement

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

As more and more researchers seek utilize new methodologies, such as computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, data visualization, and text mining, academic libraries have begun to expand their support for these data services as well. In this working group, librarians who support data services, digital humanities, and digital pedagogy came together to discuss these growth areas in data services, how they are being supported at their institutions, opportunities for collaborative support across the Oberlin Group, and how liberal arts institutions can bring a unique perspective to these methods.

Enriching Student Learning With Data Visualization, Adam Konczewski, Louis Johnston, Diana Symons, Bennett Frensko

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

In this workshop, participants were led through our collaborative process: how we divided up tasks; identified appropriate learning objectives; crafted assignments; selected data sets; and decided on software (Tableau). We discussed what’s worked, what still needs tweaking, and how we plan to expand data visualization support to faculty members in other departments. Participants left this session with a better understanding of how they can support data visualization in the classroom, and we’ll provide lists of resources and training opportunities that will help them get started.

Sharing [True] Stories: Supporting And Sustaining Collaborative Digital Oral History Archives And Research, Rachel Walton, Charlotte Nunes

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

The grant-funded [True] Stories project aims to provide instructors from a variety of disciplines and on multiple campuses the critical resources and expertise needed to make student-driven oral history work possible, impactful, accessible, and a permanent part of collections. As such, the project PIs are committed to building and vetting a practical model for oral history classroom collaborations between smaller, moderately-funded college archives or libraries. In addition to the expected challenges of technological and interdisciplinary collaboration, the [True] Stories face critical digital preservation decisions and roadblocks: shared and sustainable digital storage solutions; a standard set of acquisition, processing, and curatorial …

Learning From Success: Approaching Data Management In The Humanities With Optimism And Good Cheer, Iris Jastram, Kristin Partlo, Sarah D. Calhoun

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Scientists and Social Scientists are well supported and accustomed to thinking about the life-cycles of their data and writing data management plans. The variety of humanities data and the novelty of managing it over its life-cycle often leads to confusion at best and chaos at worst during humanities research projects. In this discussion session we looked at a template for a humanities data management plan, successful data management plans for grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and discussed what humanities faculty at our institutions need to know about data management and what support structures they need in order …

Collaborating Across Units To Support Digital Scholarship, Alicia Peaker, Ryan Clement, Patrick Wallace

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

In this session, participants shared strategies and best practices for collaborating across units to support digital scholarship. The leaders briefly described two recent examples of successful collaborations at Middlebury College, instituting Omeka support & running a Liberal Arts Data Bootcamp, before opening up for broader discussions and brainstorming.

A Digital Quandary: Limited Vs Broadly Accessible Collections, Andrea Jackson, Christine Wiseman

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

The AUC Woodruff Library has been successful in creating digital collections open broadly and widely to anyone in the world with an internet connection. While substantially increasing the use of collections for digital humanities scholarship, archivists have noticed some frustration from researchers about limited accessibility of two of the repository’s most popular collections which are only accessible in the Reading Room – the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. and Tupac Amaru Shakur Collections. Staff from the AUC Woodruff Library’s Archives Research Center and Digital Services Unit discussed this quandary with conference attendees by sharing experiences, and best practices for …

Lever Press Panel, Rebecca Welzenbach, Teresa Fishel, Karil Kucera

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

This panel introduced and discussed the Lever Press, a new publishing initiative for peer-reviewed, open access, digitally native scholarly monographs supported by more than 40 liberal arts colleges.

• Rebecca Welzenbach, University of Michigan, "A Place to Stand: Fulcrum and Lever Press"
• Terri Fishel, Macalester College, "Lever Press: From Start to Present"
• Karil Kucera, St. Olaf College, "Publish or Perish: A Faculty Perspective on Digital Publishing"

Agriculture On The Brink:Climate Change, Labor And Smallholder Farming In Botswana, William G. Moseley

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

From British Colonization To The Green Revolution: Legacies Of Imperialism On The Development Of A Sikh Consciousness Of Nationhood In The 1980s, Dilreet Kaur Dhaliwal

Political Science Honors Projects

This paper connects the rise of Sikh Fundamentalist movements in the 1980s, which sparked a widespread consciousness of a Sikh nationhood, to a history of imperialism that both led to smallholders’ economic precariousness and encouraged an exclusive, masculine Sikh identity over time. Through a process of friction, which considers a history rooted in political economy, both smallholders and young educated men joined the agitation against the central government as it refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the demands highlighted in the Anandpur Resolution. The British first facilitated wide-scale agricultural commodification and along with urban Sikhs, advocated for an exclusive Sikh …

How Does Information In Fuel Economy Labels Affect Consumer Choice?, Lauren Beatty

Economics Honors Projects

This paper examines the effect of different pieces of information in fuel economy labels on consumer choice using data from a discrete choice experiment. In the experiment, participants are randomly assigned to treatment groups and asked to make choices between vehicle alternatives. Fuel economy labels vary over treatment group. Individual-specific discount rates are elicited in the survey, allowing this analysis to disentangle the effects of information and discount rate on choice. The analysis estimates each individual's willingness to pay for a one dollar reduction in present value of operating costs, then examines how information affects the willingness to pay coefficient. …

Interconnections Between Perceptions Of Blame, Mind, And Moral Abilities, Alex Ropes, Steve Guglielmo

Psychology Honors Projects

Theories of blame, mind, and moral attribution consider an individual’s perceived agency, operationalized in part as perceived intentionality and self-control. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may display social deficits and a greater tendency to engage in problem behavior (PB; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) than neurotypical (NT) people, which may lead people to perceive that individuals with ASD act less agentically. Study 1 shows that the mitigated perceived agency of people with ASD leads to mitigated blame attribution. In addition to perceived agency, theories of mind and moral attribution account for perceptions of an individual’s capacity to experience emotions, pleasure, …

Language Use Statistics And Perceptual Simulation In Language Processing, Alena Hejl

Linguistics Honors Projects

Humans’ ability to comprehend language seems to rely on both mental reconstructions of what we have experienced in the world and statistically-based expectations of how language is used. This study adapted a comparison of perceptual and statistical explanations of word comprehension in the auditory modality. Participants completed a series of trials in which they heard cue words, some of which were spatially oriented (e.g., sky, ground), and then completed a letter identification task. In this task, the letter appeared on the computer screen in either a congruent location or an incongruent location. The position of the letter at the top …

Car Sharing And Local Sustainability: Exposing The Implications Of Assumption-Based Sustainability Initiatives In Minneapolis, Paige Moody

Geography Honors Projects

As the sharing economy proliferates, so does the assumption that all sharing is inherently sustainable. Discourse analysis of car sharing in Minneapolis reveals that this assumption has driven the development of partnerships with two car share programs, one nonprofit and the other for-profit, in the city. Empirical analysis, however, exposes that the two programs, while consistently equated in city policy, have significantly different impacts on local sustainability, especially in terms of public transit usage and social equity. This study highlights powerful implications for the dangers of assumption-based public-private partnerships created within local sustainability initiatives.

Blue Eyes On Red Lists: Conservation And The Future Of The Blue-Eyed Black Lemur, Katherine Meier

Award Winning Anthropology Papers

The family Lemuridae represents a large and important group within the order Primate. Today, lemurs—endemic to Madagascar—are the most threatened mammal group on Earth. Almost every one of the 100-plus recognized species suffers from habitat destruction and other anthropogenic pressures. The IUCN lists the blue-eyed black lemur (Eulemur flavifrons) as critically endangered. Models suggest it will go extinct within the next decade and so far, conservation efforts have so far yielded little measurable success. For the blue-eyed black lemur, captive populations—typically serving as buffers against extinction— are experiencing problems that keep them from being viable for reintroduction into …

Is The Affordable Care Act's Individual Mandate A Certified Job-Killer?, Cory Stern

Economics Honors Projects

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act argue that its individual mandate component is a "certified job-killer." In this paper, I develop a Real Business Cycle model with a search-based labor market to test the validity of these concerns. I integrate the individual mandate into the model and conduct a general equilibrium analysis of its effects. The simulated results show that the imposition of the individual mandate regime should result in higher levels of aggregate employment and output.

Determining Household Health Care Spending: An Analysis Of The Massachusetts Health Care Reform, Caroline Johns

Economics Honors Projects

This study aims to determine the effect of the Massachusetts Health Care Reform on household health care expenditures. I follow the consumer choice theoretical framework, which says that a change in the price of health care will cause households to adjust their consumption choices based on their preferences. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, I apply a difference-in-difference technique to isolate the effect of the reform on spending on health care, prescription drugs, and health insurance as a share of total household expenditures. The results are not statistically significant. However, using a difference-in-difference-in-differences estimation to determine the effect of …

Hurricanes And Long-Term Gdp Growth: The Role Of Institutional Quality, Kyoko Sakai

Economics Honors Projects

This paper compares the long-term effects on real per-capita GDP of two hurricanes in 1992, hurricane Andrew in Florida and hurricane Iniki in Hawaii. The literature suggests that the long-term effect on GDP of a natural disaster for a region with good pre-disaster institutional quality may be positive (i.e., GDP levels exceed those which would have materialized without the disaster) because the destruction of capital induces firms to investment in more technologically advanced structures and machines. In contrast, a region with bad pre-disaster institutional quality should experience a negative impact because it face severe limits in the amount it can …

Religion And Well-Being: Differences By Identity And Practice, Marium H. Ibrahim

Psychology Honors Projects

Religion is often related to greater psychological well-being in college students (Burris et al., 2009). However, across studies, researchers have conceptualized “religion” in different ways. Despite the fact that religious identity and practice tend to be related, these aspects of religion may be differentially related to well-being (Lopez, Huynh & Fuligni, 2011). In addition, the relationship between religion and well-being may differ based on societal factors such as race and gender (Diener, Tay & Myers, 2011). In this study, 157 undergraduate students completed measures of religious identity, religious practice, public regard (the extent to which people feel that their race …

Gender, Media, And The White House: An Examination Of Gender In The Media Coverage Of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, And Ted Cruz In The 2016 Elections, Rose E. Allen

Political Science Honors Projects

This paper examines the role of gender in the media coverage of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz in the 2016 election cycle. Analyzing newspaper articles, Twitter pages, and campaign advertisements, I compare the media coverage of these three candidates to their own campaign messages. My findings reveal that Clinton received more personal coverage than Sanders or Cruz, despite less of an emphasis on personal characteristics in her own campaign materials. I also find that Clinton received less coverage on “feminine issues” such as women’s health and paid family leave, despite her own campaign’s focus on these issues. I …

What Went Wrong: Why The Us’S State-Building Efforts Failed In The War In Afghanistan, Jeffrey S. Witter

Political Science Honors Projects

The security situation has deteriorated rapidly in Afghanistan following the end of NATO’s combat mission in 2014. The Taliban has seized control of large swathes of the country, and many predict that the country will remain in a violent state of civil war for years to come. The time has come to critically examine some of the intellectual underpinnings of the war in order to understand why the US’s mission to bring about a peaceful and stable Afghanistan has failed. This project will answer the question “Why did state-building fail in Afghanistan?” I explore the divide between two intellectual schools …

Mindset Matters: Measuring Anxiety Mindsets, Jillian S. Merrick

Psychology Honors Projects

Considerable research supports Dweck’s (2006) theory of mindsets, yet few researchers have studied mental health mindset. The current study explores this link through developing a measure that applies Dweck’s dimensions of fixed vs. growth mindset to appraisals of anxiety while also assessing beliefs about strategies for managing anxiety. In Studies 1-4, we develop this measure and report the correlations among the four scales - Fixed, Growth, Acceptance, and Change - as well as the correlations between these scales and various measures of wellbeing in both undergraduate and high school samples. Study 5 builds on and extends this research by using …

Perceived School Style And Academic Outcomes Among Ethnically Diverse College Students, Rowan Hilty, Cari Gillen-O'Neel

Psychology Honors Projects

Students’ perceptions of their schools play an important role in achievement. One framework for measuring students’ perceptions is an adaptation of Baumrind’s parenting typology, which measures perceived “school style” (Pellerin, 2005) along two dimensions of responsiveness (warmth) and demandingness (high academic expectations). Although research suggests that perceptions of authoritative styles (both responsive and demanding) correlate with better student outcomes (Dornbusch et al., 1987), no existing research has considered whether these findings apply to ethnically diverse samples. We surveyed 301 students from five Midwestern colleges who completed measures of perceived school style, perceived discrimination, and several academic outcomes. Academically stigmatized students …

Exploring The Role Of Horticulture In Alleviating Food Insecurity Among Women In Botswana, Rachel Fehr

Geography Honors Projects

By most measures, Botswana is an African development success story. However, there are still segments of the population that suffer from the interlinked phenomena of persistent poverty and food insecurity. The Government of Botswana and its partners have increasingly sought to address household food insecurity through gardening initiatives of various sizes and commercial orientation, but the success of these efforts has not yet been evaluated. I use an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating both econometric analysis and qualitative data viewed through the theoretical lens of political ecology, to determine how effective these women’s gardening initiatives are in addressing household food insecurity. I …