Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Why Video Game Genres Fail: A Classificatory Analysis, Rachel I. Clarke, Jin Ha Lee, Neils Clark

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper explores the current affordances and limitations of video game genre from a library and information science perspective with an emphasis on classification theory. We identify and discuss various purposes of genre relating to video games, including identity, collocation and retrieval, commercial marketing, and educational instruction. Through the use of examples, we discuss the ways in which these purposes are supported by genre classification and conceptualization, and the implications for video games. Suggestions for improved conceptualizations such as family resemblances, prototype theory, faceted classification, and appeal factors for video game genres are considered, with discussions of strengths and weaknesses. …

A Qualitative Investigation Of Users’ Video Game Information Needs And Behaviors, Rachel I. Clarke, Jin Ha Lee, Stephanie Rossi

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Video games are popular consumer products as well as research subjects, yet little exists about how players and other stakeholders find video games and what information they need to select, acquire, and play video games. With the aim of better understanding people’s game-related information needs and behaviors, we conducted 56 semi-structured interviews with users who find, play, purchase, collect, and recommend video games. Participants included casual and avid gamers, parents, collectors, industry professionals, librarians, and scholars. From this user data, we derive and discuss key design implications for video game information systems: designing for target user populations, enabling recommendations on …

Sharing Historic Costume Collections Online, Arden Kirkland, Kathi Martin, Marlise Schoeny, Kiki Smith, Gayle Strege

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The recent increase in online costume history resources has provided scholars of dress with fresh sources of information for inspiring and validating their research. The best digital archives consider the needs of their users in creating systems that make it easy for more users to access the greatest amount of relevant information. Users of online costume history resources have specific needs that should be addressed, both for internal users (organizing and entering information) and external users (finding information). This paper follows a panel presentation at the 2014 Symposium of the Costume Society of America, on the subject of digital initiatives …

Designer Genes, Designer Drugs And Resources Designing “The New Biology”: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Fred Stoss

Upstate New York Science Librarians Conference

A seven-foot 1950s-style model of DNA hangs in my office, as a reminder of what we then knew about “The Molecule of Life.” We today marvel at how far we have come in our understanding of that molecule, its impact on the study of biology, and the new discoveries in “The New Biology” of the Post-Genomic Era. What resources, services, publications and training is required of science librarians to assist students, faculties, and staff. What are today’s driving forces directing “The Newest Biology?”

Collaborating To Improve Biological Sciences Students’ Writing And Research Skills, Tina Chan

Upstate New York Science Librarians Conference

Learn how the SUNY Oswego biological sciences librarian, biological sciences faculty member, and biological sciences academic advisement coordinator have collaborated to improve biological sciences students’ writing and research skills by offering a writing workshop and writing labs. The writing workshop teaches how to write lab reports, evaluating and citing sources, and plagiarism. The writing labs allow students to learn research skills and to gain feedback on their lab report draft.

Citation Manager Comparison, Anne E. Rauh

Libraries' and Librarians' Publications

No abstract provided.

Capturing The Impairment Profile Of College Students With Sluggish Cognitive Tempo Symptoms, Whitney Lee Muhlenkamp Wood

Dissertations - ALL

Over the past 15 years, researchers have shown increasing interest in Sluggish Cognitive Tempo (SCT) symptoms. Though SCT symptoms were once considered symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) inattentive type, controversy now exists regarding the role of the SCT symptom set in mental health. Several questions remain regarding whether SCT symptoms are separate from related symptom sets (i.e., ADHD, anxiety, depression) and whether SCT symptoms have any negative impact on a person's day-to-day functioning. This exploratory study examined a large, general sample of college students to determine (a) whether SCT symptoms form a separate factor from ADHD, anxiety, and …

The Political Economy Of Ceramic Production In Barbados: From Plantation Industry To Craft Production, Dwayne Scheid

Dissertations - ALL

This project examines archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data regarding ceramic production in Barbados during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The project uses multiscalar analysis, microhistory, and craft and industrial production as lenses for examining the production, distribution and use of local ceramics to explore changes in local craft production. The local production of ceramics allowed sugar plantation managers and owners to use local resources by providing ceramics used in the production of sugar which facilitated economic production on the island's plantations. Sugar pots and cones were used directly in the production of sugar and other ceramic items like tiles …

Parent-Child Communication Among African American Families: Does "Being On The Same Page" Protect Against Adolescent Sexual Risk Behavior?, Katherine Bonafide

Dissertations - ALL

African American adolescents continue to be at high risk for HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Sexual risk reduction efforts have focused on family-level sexual health communication, although they have yielded inconsistent findings. Using dyadic data from African American parents and their children (n= 298), the present study sought to elucidate the influence of sexual health communication on adolescent sexual behavior. Findings confirmed that adolescent reports of family-level sex communication were associated with greater sexual involvement, whereas parent reports of sexual health communication showed no associations to child sexual behavior. Including parent reports of communication did not enhance predictive models …

Web Communications On Corporate Social Responsibility Of Chinese And United States Fortune 500 Companies, Yijing Liu

Dissertations - ALL

This paper uses content analysis to compare corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication strategies on the websites of Fortune 500 companies both in China and the United States. This study aims to determine how CSR communication strategies differ between China and the United States by comparing the purpose, main stakeholders, types of CSR programs, compliance with the International CSR standards, and the existence of CSR annual reports. This study is based on recent discussion and theory-building efforts in public relations literature regarding evolving CSR practices. The overarching theoretical framework will be the so-called stakeholder theory and CSR communication strategy. The results …

Chiraq: One Person's Metaphor Is Another's Reality, Jacoby Cochran

Dissertations - ALL

ABSTRACT

This Master's thesis explores the deployment and appropriation of the war metaphor as it relates to criminal justice policy in the United States from 1930 forward, paying close attention to the 1980s and 2010s. More specifically, this thesis centers on the city of Chicago to analyze the use of the war metaphor throughout the city's history, from earlier invocations by Mayors to present- day, local appropriations in the form of the metaphor Chiraq, which blends Chicago and Iraq as a statement to the conditions of some of Chicago's most resource deprived neighborhoods. Using Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) Conceptual Metaphor …

Which Jobs For Which Boys? Party Financing, Patronage And State Capacity In African Democracies, Rachel Sigman

Dissertations - ALL

Both Benin and Ghana are amongst Africa's most celebrated examples of democratic success, but there is growing divergence in the capacity of their state institutions to act as effective agents of development. Why? This dissertation argues that modes of party financing are integral to understanding patterns of patronage-based recruitment to public office, and that these patronage practices have consequences for the broader developmental capacities of the state.

The first part of the dissertation shows that leaders use political patronage not only as a means of "buying" votes, but more fundamentally as a means of exerting control over the state's resources. …

Library Video Collaborations, Jill Powell, Jeremy Cusker, Sean Taylor

Upstate New York Science Librarians Conference

Library videos are common on YouTube, but finding the time and resources to produce them is a challenge. A collaboration among the engineering librarians, the College of Engineering Teaching Excellence Institute, Library IT, and the Research and Assessment Unit at Cornell identified resources and resulted in the production of 8 videos for specific classes in materials science and biomedical engineering. Jill and Jeremy will discuss the details of the collaboration; Sean the software and hardware used.

Organizing Chemical Information To Support Lab Safety, Leah Mcewen

Upstate New York Science Librarians Conference

The Internet provides ready access to a wide variety of information sources relevant to answering chemical safety questions in the laboratory. However, this information is found in a wide variety of formats with varying audiences and intents. The quality of the information is difficult to evaluate, organize, and use to support risk assessment of laboratory work with hazardous chemicals. Professionals in health and safety, chemistry librarianship and informatics are partnering to address these challenges particularly in the academic research and teaching context. Goals are to streamline access to relevant data from authoritative sources, organize and classify chemical safety information to …

A Practical Comparison Of Scopus And Web Of Science, A. Ben Wagner

Upstate New York Science Librarians Conference

Few organizations can afford both Web of Science and Scopus, making it difficult for librarians to make in-depth comparisons to support acquisition decisions. The new SUNY-wide Elsevier Big Deal included access to Scopus making it possible for our unversity to perform a review based on the current and much improved interfaces of both databases. Search, display, & analysis features will be compared with a special emphasis on author/institution disambiguation via clustering and citation metrics.

Purposeful Gaming: Crowdsourcing The Correction Of Ocred Text In Biodiversity Heritage, Marty Schlabach

Upstate New York Science Librarians Conference

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of scanned text enables full-text searching. Unfortunately, OCR software does not produce 100% accurate representation of the text, especially with older works having varying fonts, odd layouts and ink bleed-through. Led by Missouri Botanical Garden, and partnering with New York Botanical Garden, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and Cornell, an IMLS-funded project has developed 2 games to engage the public in correcting inaccurately OCRed text in BHL.

Privileged Resistance: Prisoners Of Conscience In The United States, 1980-2013, Anya Stanger

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation tells the story of modern anti-war prisoners of conscience in the United States-people who are incarcerated for six months or more as a result of nonviolent resistance. It explores how they intentionally use and learn about their own privilege in solidarity actions that land them in the belly of the imperial beast; the prison. It traces the lives of forty three such prisoners of conscience, from discernment of action through release, to show how "who they are" (in terms of their visible identities and private senses of self) impacts their experiences, the ways they are understood, and their …

Screens And Stereotypes: The Transmission Of Images Of Women Of Color On Twitter And Television, Sherri Marie Williams

Dissertations - ALL

For decades African-American women and Latinas have lamented the abundance of negative and unrealistic images of them reflected on television. Such images appear to be pervasive today on reality television shows, the most popular television show genre, where many historic negative stereotypes of women of color are conveyed. Social television, the practice of watching television and simultaneously commenting on social media, is now common among viewers. The aim of this research is to determine if the same old stereotypes of women of color on television are finding their way to the new medium of Twitter. This study is a textual …

Recommendations, Rhetoric, And Reporting: State And Ngo Behavior In The Universal Periodic Review Of Human Rights, Michael Joseph Beckstrand

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation takes a detailed look at the role of non-state "stakeholders," overwhelmingly civil society non-governmental organizations (CSOs or NGOs), in human rights promotion within the process of the United Nations Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights. Utilizing a mixed-method, text-heavy approach, I conduct analyses of both state behavior and NGO activity within the first cycle of the Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights and examine the monitoring and follow-up practices between review rounds through paired cases in the second round of reviews. In these analyses, first I show that NGO activity, after controlling for the amount …

Investor Relations: A Study Of Perceived Fundamental Skills And Practices In Corporations And Agencies, Shuyi Li

Dissertations - ALL

Today, the importance of investor relations as a strategic management function in publicly held companies is growing. In the interdisciplinary field of investor relations, professionals need both finance and communication expertise to achieve effective investor relations results. This paper investigates investor relations professionals' perceptions of the fundamental skills and practices needed in corporations and agencies through an online self-administered survey. It finds that the professionals perceived relationship-building skills with media and the investment community to be the most important. A knowledge of information disclosure process, senior management assistance and crisis communication management were also seen as important. The professionals indicated …

Marginalization And Democracy: Kenya's 2007 Post Election Violence, Hamdi Ibrahim Tartarini

Dissertations - ALL

Until recently, Kenya was considered an icon, a bastion of political stability and economic growth in East Africa and Africa in general. Forty-four years after gaining independence, and fifteen years since the beginning of multiparty democracy, the ruling elite touted this exceptionalism to conceal the historical grievances of marginalized communities. Given this background, the electoral violence experienced between December 2007 and March 2008 came as a surprise to many. Much scholarship on the topic focuses on the immediate triggers such as voting irregularities rather than the underlying conditions that existed prior to the violence. In this study, I attempt to …

Mediated Motherhood: Discourse And Maternal Identity In The Digital Age, Melissa A. Vaillancourt

Dissertations - ALL

The ubiquity of the smartphone is both celebrated and contested, since the possibility of constant connectivity is seen as simultaneously inviting and exciting on the one hand, and demanding and burdensome on the other. This thesis uses discourse analysis to analyze a television interview and an online comment forum to shed light on the ways in which experts and mothers talk about the impacts of technology on family interaction and parenting practices. I consider how both experts and parents discursively construct the family-technology relationship by analyzing how parents communicate about technology use (both their own and their children's), the emotional …

Developing A Framework For Stigmergic Human Collaboration With Technology Tools: Cases In Emergency Response, Janet Hinda Watkins Marsden

Dissertations - ALL

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), particularly social media and geographic information systems (GIS), have become a transformational force in emergency response. Social media enables ad hoc collaboration, providing timely, useful information dissemination and sharing, and helping to overcome limitations of time and place. Geographic information systems increase the level of situation awareness, serving geospatial data using interactive maps, animations, and computer generated imagery derived from sophisticated global remote sensing systems. Digital workspaces bring these technologies together and contribute to meeting ad hoc and formal emergency response challenges through their affordances of situation awareness and mass collaboration. Distributed ICTs that enable …

Electricity Generation Location And Benefits To Human Health: What Health Benefits Can Be Attributed To Rggi In New Jersey, New York, And Pennsylvania?, Todd Metcalfe

Dissertations - ALL

This paper estimates the benefits, primarily from human health gains, from the longest running U.S. CO2 control program. Further, it examines the patterns of electric generation to evaluate changes at regional and state levels, to better understand the potential of CO2 leakage, which is CO2 being emitted from generation that has moved from a regulated to a non-regulated state, and thus weakening the effects of the regulation.

This examination is achieved using a unique dataset of observed generation levels at fossil fuel plants from the year 2000 to 2013, in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. It is estimated that …

Audit, Accountability And Commitment: School Business Officials' Perceptions Of An Audit Regime, Michael A. Torak

Dissertations - ALL

Prior research has suggested that models intended to explain the organizational commitment of public employees have not accounted for the substantial and often intense external controls imposed on public organizations. A public scandal involving corruption and mismanagement in a New York State public school district resulted in the state legislature implementing a program of reforms intended to increase the financial accountability of public school districts. The aim of this exploratory, multi-subject qualitative study is to gain insight about how financial managers in public school districts experienced the reform and think about external controls that feature an extensive regimen of auditing. …

Essays On Local Political Economy In Brazil And The United States, Evan Andrews

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation covers different aspects of political institutions and fiscal policy in local governments. The first essay examines the political consequences of an increase in the district magnitude (the number of open seats) for legislatures. The second essay studies how the size of a local legislature affects the size and composition of public spending. The third essay develops and tests a theory of how transaction costs might affect the use of earmarked revenues by local budgeting authorities. The last essay compares the relative impacts of factors that might make a local government more likely to adopt own-source revenues. These questions …

Institute For Veterans And Military Families: Annual Report 2015, Institute For Veterans And Military Families At Syracuse University

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

This report overviews the accomplishments of the IVMF during 2014-2015.

Estimation And Identification Of Change Points In Panel Models With Nonstationary Or Stationary Regressors And Error Term, Badi H. Baltagi, Chihwa Kao, Long Liu

Center for Policy Research

This paper studies the estimation of change point in panel models. We extend Bai (2010) and Feng, Kao and Lazarová (2009) to the case of stationary or nonstationary regressors and error term, and whether the change point is present or not. We prove consistency and derive the asymptotic distributions of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and First Difference (FD) estimators. We find that the FD estimator is robust for all cases considered.

2015 Military Family Lifestyle Survey, Cristin Orr Shiffer, Rosalinda V. Maury

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

The Military Family Lifestyle Survey takes a comprehensive look at the current needs and priorities of military families and service members and identifies the key aspects of military life to effectively target resources, services, and programs that support the sustainability of the All-Volunteer Force.