Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Evaluating Cranial Nonmetric Traits In Mummies From Pachacamac, Peru: The Utility Of Semi-Automated Image Segmentation In Paleoradiology, Cameron J. Beason

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Anthropologists employ biodistance analysis to understand past population interactions and relatedness. The objectives of this thesis are twofold: to determine whether a sample of five mummies from the pilgrimage centre, Pachacamac, on the Central Coast of Peru comprised local or non-local individuals through an analysis of cranial nonmetric traits using comparative samples from the North and Central Coasts of Peru and Chile; and to test the utility of machine-learning-based image segmentation in the image analysis software, Dragonfly, to automatically segment CT scans of the mummies such that the cranial nonmetric traits are visible. Results show that while fully automated segmentation …

Using Visual Storytelling To Design Solutions-Based Approaches To Homelessness, Peggy Peattie

Dissertations

Despite millions of dollars spent over several decades on assistance programs, the nation’s homeless population has increased for the last four years in a row. The number of people reporting as homeless for the first time doubled in San Diego between June 2019 and June 2020. Trying to impose a one-size-fits-all model of care on a population comprised of unique individuals has resulted in many homeless opting for the street rather than subjugating themselves to rules they feel do not treat them with respect and dignity. Yet, the perspectives of homeless individuals are excluded from decision-making dialogue around policies and …

To Know The Land With Hands And Minds: Negotiating Agricultural Knowledge In Late-Nineteenth-Century New England And Westphalia, Justus Hillebrand

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ever since the eighteenth century, experts have tried to tell farmers how to farm. The agricultural enlightenment in Europe marked the beginning of a long arc of new experts aiming to change agricultural knowledge and practice. This dissertation analyzes the pivotal period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Germany and the United States when scientists, improvers, and market agents began to develop comprehensive ways to communicate agricultural innovation to farmers. In a functional approach to analyzing the negotiation of agricultural knowledge through its communication in things, words, and practices, this dissertation argues that the process of change …

Alcohol Advertisements On Social Media: A Study Of How Alcohol Advertisements On Social Media Platforms Appeal To Young People, Alexis Campbell

Journalism Undergraduate Honors Theses

Underage drinking is not uncommon and is associated with a number of school, social, legal, emotional, behavioral, health problems, and even death. This research seeks to explore alcohol-related social media advertisements across a variety of alcohol types, alcohol brands, and social media platforms. This was accomplished by a content analysis of the most popular alcohol brands’ advertisements on the Internet that examined the strategies used to appeal to consumers and the overall content patterns and characteristics of online alcohol advertisements. The strategy used differed by brand and alcohol type, but the most common themes included “taste,” “seasonal,” “holiday,” “recipe,” and …

Una Visión Holística De La Memoria Digital Sobre El Conflicto Armado En Las Narrativas Digitales Del Centro Nacional De Memoria Histórica De Colombia, Talia Mendez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The connective turn marks the contemporary memory boom. The omnipresence of digital media is a provocation that makes us wonder about the relationships and connections of memory with the past, present and future in the digital world (Hoskins 9).

Using a conceptual analysis based on the idea of the connective turn, this thesis shows how the National Center of Historical Memory of Colombia has been addressing the message of memory of the armed conflict through the case study of the digital narratives of the "Digital Specials", and how the message is transmitted in their Instagram profile.

The study reflects the …

Participatory Knowledge Of Motion: Ezhianishinaabebimaadiziyaang Mii Sa Ezhianishinaabeaadisokeyaang. The Way In Which We Live, That Is The Way We Write Stories., Erin E. Huner

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This is a dissertation based upon the Customary Ways Dataset, which is comprised of 50 interviews given by Elders from Walpole Island First Nation, in 2010. The over-arching, community-designed research question that guided this dissertation was: How do the Elders of Walpole Island describe their relationship to the land? To answer this question, I co-designed a mixed-methods analysis that included traditional methods from the Social Sciences, including Grounded Theory, to establish emergent themes, and some simple statistical analysis using Chi-square and crosstab analysis. I also utilized methods closely related to the Humanities, deploying Story Mapping, Close Reading and a …

The Local Accountability Journalism Tracker, Sandy Mui

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Local Accountability Journalism Tracker curates local news stories in the United States that resulted in substantial accountability or change. Published on a Tumblr website, each local news story includes a blurb detailing what the story was about as well as the accountability or change that followed the story’s publication. News stories must meet the following criteria for inclusion:

1. Be published by a news outlet in the United States;
2. Cover a social issue or criminal activity at the local level;[1]
3. Lead to heightened awareness (whether local, national, or international) in the general public about the social issue or criminal …

Negotiated Access: Haccessibility, Autonomy, And Infrastructure In The Age Of The Abstraction, Patrick Smyth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Negotiated Access asks how we can exercise our values from within systems and structures over which we have little control. The project, fundamentally, is about autonomy, a specific form of resistance to control, or the ability to act on values or goals despite influence from outside or above. Negotiation, here, is the ongoing encounter with enclosing or encircling systems, entities, or spaces. It is the gap, the small room for maneuver, between ourselves and the physical or social environment.

The project begins with local and concrete challenges and radiates outward to analyze and critique broader structures, forces, and institutions that …

The Public Innovations Explorer: A Geo-Spatial & Linked-Data Visualization Platform For Publicly Funded Innovation Research In The United States, Seth Schimmel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Public Innovations Explorer (https://sethsch.github.io/innovations-explorer/app/index.html) is a web-based tool created using Node.js, D3.js and Leaflet.js that can be used for investigating awards made by Federal agencies and departments participating in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant-making programs between 2008 and 2018. By geocoding the publicly available grants data from SBIR.gov, the Public Innovations Explorer allows users to identify companies performing publicly-funded innovative research in each congressional district and obtain dynamic district-level summaries of funding activity by agency and year. Applying spatial clustering techniques on districts' employment levels across major economic sectors provides users …

But Also Full Of Seeds For A Future That Could Have Turned Out Differently., Megan Marie Bickel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the relationship between "illusion," "allusion," and their relationship to contemporary images which announce, shield, or reference information. Beginning by discussing Casualist and Post-Digital Painting discourse, two styles I work within, we see connecting tissue in announcing and shielding of meaning. We look at the meaning of marks, and in the parallel exhibition, marks that utilize camouflage strategies appear as a metaphor for illuding to information which appears as conveying depth when there is none, and using paintings' symbols in objects that are not paintings. The work 'alludes' to what the viewer has seen before and relies on …

The Internet-Extended Mind: The Psychological Ramifications And Philosophical Implications Of Cognitive Offloading, Gloria Choi

Scripps Senior Theses

In this thesis, I explore the internet-extended mind through both philosophical and psychological lenses in order to investigate the questions “To what extent is the mind extended onto the internet and, more generally, outside our bodies?” and “How will an increasingly internet-extended brain change the ways in which humans communicate, remember, and behave?”. First, I introduce the idea of a mind that extends out into the world, instead of lying solely in the brain. Then, I outline existing research that introduces the challenges and implications of an internet-extended mind in an ever-changing internet landscape. Next, I discuss how the internet …

Visualizing Tedx Events: Ten Years Of “Ideas Worth Spreading”, Antonios Liamis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I have always been fascinated by how ideas are spread. Often, ideas are chosen to serve an immediate purpose, and there is an expectation that the choice will matter only insofar as it serves to achieve the desired goal. However, once an idea takes off, it becomes sufficient in itself to disseminate its message. When I first heard about the rubric “Ideas Worth Spreading” in connection with Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conferences, I had an emotional response because I was always trying to get involved in those three categories. My fascination with the question of what makes some ideas …

360º Video And Language Documentation: Towards A Corpus Of Kanien'kéha (Mohawk), Joseph Pentangelo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Robust documentation is a major goal of documentary linguistics. Recognizing spoken language as a multimodal phenomenon, researchers working in this field broadly agree that video is an improvement over audio-only recording. At the same time, video is limited by the format’s frame, which permits only a relatively small portion of the visual field to be recorded at any given time. This results in much data being lost, as the documenter must decide where to aim their camera, necessarily leaving out more than they record.

In this dissertation, I apply 360º video to language documentation for the first time. 360º video, …

Digital Occult Library, Alexis Brandkamp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is a website, titled Digital Occult Library, hosted by the CUNY Commons and built with WordPress. The site address is:

digitaloccultlibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu

It features (in this iteration) twenty-five unique pages with information on and discussion of occult and esoteric topics. It also hosts a forum that can be accessed and utilized by anyone, not just those registered on the Commons. The purpose of the site is to inform three types of interested parties on the highlighted topics: a general audience with no current knowledge of the occult, practitioners of esoteric traditions, and academics. Not only is the …

Fair World 64: A Text-Based Game Of The 1964–1965 World's Fair, Christofer R. Gass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project is a text-based game of a typical day during the first season of the 1964 World’s Fair in what is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The 1964-1965 World’s Fair, that Robert Moses presided over as president, was one of the largest and most expensive fairs ever created, but only days after the last fairgoer left through the turnstile most of the many pavilions that brought education, entertainment, and joy to so many people were destroyed to leave a vast open space that is relatively empty to this day. Although most of the pavilions were either relocated or demolished, there …

“I’M Real I Thought I Told Ya”: Developing Critical Media Literacy Through U.S. Latinx Digital Media Representations, Solange T. Castellar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how audiences engage with U.S. Latinx media representations through the practice of critical media literacy. I interrogate how media consumers construct critical media literacy through interacting with U.S. Latinx figures on digital media platforms, particularly on the social-media app, Twitter, and the user-generated video content platform, YouTube. Throughout this thesis, I argue that users on these platforms who engage with U.S. Latinx pop culture figures, like Jennifer Lopez and Belcalis Almanzar (Cardi B), read, digest, and comprehend a variety of multimedia images, texts, or videos, and that this engagement becomes an accessible form of critical media literacy, …

The Invisible Professional: Visual Culture Of Successful Black Women, Sophonie Gaspard

All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations

Black women in the United States have been arguably the most underrepresented, stereotyped, and hypersexualized groups in society; their contributions in the workplace often reduced in significance. Similarly, the perceived values of the white majority have historically dictated the images of minorities in the media. In their research on visual culture, Keifer-Boyd, Amburgy & Knight (2007) suggest that those with social, political, and economic power define how groups without power are represented and stereotyped, illuminating the privileges of having visible positive portrayals. As contemporary American society shifts towards greater inclusion and participation from black women, the media is encouraged to …

Malaria Risk On Ancient Roman Roads: A Study And Application To Assessing Travel Decisions In Asia Minor By The Apostle Paul, Daniel C. Browning Jr

Master's Theses

This study models malaria risks for travelers on ancient Roman roads with the goal of providing a tool for historical assessment of travel accounts from antiquity. The project includes: identification of malaria risk factors and associated spatial datasets, malaria risk model construction, verification and validation against available pre-eradication data, overlay of ancient Roman road data, and an initial case-study application to the journeys of the Apostle Paul, as narrated in the New Testament book, Acts of the Apostles (Acts). The project is intentionally cross-disciplinary in bringing the technical capabilities of GIS to the task of evaluating nuanced textual sources for …

An Assessment Of The Use Of Photogrammetry In Cranial Metric And Non-Metric Studies, Amy Hair

Master's Theses

Methods in biological anthropology have made tremendous leaps in recent years and with the increasing rise in technology there is no reason to suspect that this trend will be decreasing. Particularly methods in 3D digitization have not only increased but have also become more accessible in bioarchaeology. One method, photogrammetry, offers bioarcheologists a unique opportunity to easily collect and process cranial metric and non-metric data that can be used to quantify biological relatedness. While these advances are expected to continue, it is ignorant to assume that they represent a fail proof solution. A critical examination is necessary to quantify the …

Contemporary Francophone West African Social Movements In The Rise Of Neo Pan-Africanism: A Case Study Of Y En A Marre In Senegal., Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba Ndiaye

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of the Y en a marre movement in 2011 has reshaped the face of social activism in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. In less than a decade of its existence, Y’en a marre has become iconic in Senegalese civil society and beyond. Their effective opposition to the Wade regime between 2011 and 2012 reverberated beyond the Senegalese border through their slogan “touche pas à ma constitution” (Do not touch my constitution), a rallying cry that young people in Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic of Congo later appropriated, thus giving the movement a Pan-African platform. The birth of Y’en …

Hair: How Naturals Are Using Social Media To Reshape The Narrative And Visual Rhetoric Of Black Hair, Shari E. Drumond

All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations

Black women’s natural hair has been subject to both praise and scrutiny, though the latter is more common despite the steps taken towards inclusion and diversity. In the age of social media, members of the natural hair community have been able to voice and communicate ideas and issues that are specific to their discourse community. This study explores how the natural hair community uses social media, more specifically Instagram, to discuss the complex issues that surround natural hair including historicization, workplace bias, colorism, and social justice. Additionally, this study argues that natural hair is a form of visual rhetoric as …

Using Engaged Rhetorical Methods To Understand And Inform Collaborative Decision Making About Dams And Restoration In The Penobscot River Watershed, Tyler Quiring

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

How do we understand what to do with rivers and dams? How might rhetoric, the ancient study of persuasion, inform and shape this understanding as it relates to river restoration practices? Ecological approaches to rhetoric provide ways for engaging in decision making about dams and river restoration. In this dissertation I present three projects that bring media discourse analysis, reciprocal case study, and cross-cultural digital rhetoric to sites of collaborative decision making about dams and rivers in the Penobscot River watershed (Maine, USA). In this place, the prominent Penobscot River Restoration reconfigured several hydroelectric dams to improve fish passage and …

"#Does This Count As Poetry?": A Genre Analysis Of Tumblr Poetry, Selena Cotte

College of Communication Master of Arts Theses

This thesis canonizes “Tumblr poetry” as a distinct and separate genre of poetry, closely related to other digital poetry movements but ultimately its own phenomenon. Through historical analysis, the criticism against Tumblr poetry and digital poetry as a whole become familiar in a cycle of negative reactions to changing poets and changing audiences. Through textual analysis of poems found on Tumblr, common attributes and style changes are identified and contrasted with more traditional contemporary poetry, signifying a distinct formal shift. Finally, through a platform analysis, poetry communities on Reddit and Instagram are similarly analyzed and contrasted with Tumblr poetry to …

The Afterlives Of Government Documents: Information Labor, Archival Power, And The Visibility Of U.S. Human Rights Violations In The “War On Terror”, Rachel Daniell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about access to information.

It examines the different ways that access to U.S. government records related to the “War on Terror” is generated through the intersection of law, bureaucratic policy and procedure norms, and the everyday work of archivists and transparency advocates. I argue that, both through their labor pushing for access to government records via complex records searches, Freedom of Information Act requests, and legal action, and also through their labor layering those records with new forms of metadata in public digital circulation platforms, these individuals, in the context of their organizations, generate new forms of …

The Zine Union Catalog, Lauren S. Kehoe, Jenna Freedman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lauren Kehoe and Jenna Freedman have been working on the Zine Union Catalog, aka ZineCat or ZUC, since their Introduction to Digital Humanities course in Spring, 2017: MALS 75500, Digital Humanities Methods and Practices. ZineCat is the home of a union catalog dedicated to zines. A union catalog is a resource where libraries and other cultural institutions that collect materials can share cataloging and holdings information from their individual collections. The most familiar union catalog is probably WorldCat which is used to locate books, journals, CDs, DVDs, and other materials in the world’s libraries. ZineCat facilitates researchers' discovery of zine …

Mary Sachs: Two Types Of Beauty In Harrisburg, Robin Schwarzmann

Student Scholarship

Harrisburg’s City Beautiful Movement presented by historian, William H. Wilson, and journalist, Paul Beers, among others, often focuses too narrowly on the term beauty, leaving other types of beauty out of the narrative. The narrative frequently focuses on men instead of women, policies instead of people, and external beauty rather than internal beauty. However, both types of beauty were crucial in Harrisburg’s City Beautiful Movement.

Mary Sachs was a Russian born immigrant, who came to America with her family at four years old. Sachs began her life in Baltimore, where she worked in a factory as a teenager. However, when …

Friends Of Reform: The Correspondence Of J. Horace Mcfarland And Mira Lloyd Dock, Molly Elspas, Anna Strange

Student Scholarship

The City Beautiful movement in Harrisburg benefited from the part- nership of two key reformers, J. Horace McFarland and Mira Lloyd Dock. A close reading of their correspondence offers insight into the nature of their relationship, their personal views, and reflections on the long-term effects of City Beautiful.

Network Of City Beautiful Reformers: Humanizing Harrisburg’S Influencers, Anna Strange

Student Scholarship

How do we find out information about strangers in our society today? We ask their friends about them, observe their interactions with others, or possibly check their social media. When researching people in the early 20th century, we can uncover clues to people’s character by using archival research. We can study them in their space and place using geospatial and census data. Mira Lloyd Dock, J. Horace McFarland, and Warren H. Manning were three key reformers who rose to prominence during the City Beautiful Movement in Harrisburg, defined broadly as the period of urban development from 1900-1930 . They formed …

Chambers Of Reflection: Rousseau, Tocqueville, And Self-Government In The Digital Age, John Sweeney

Honors Projects

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville each warn that the dominant cultures of their days may hinder the project of self-government. Against the backdrop of advancing Enlightenment philosophy, Rousseau writes that as social visibility increases relative to intimate connection, the drive for recognition corrupts self-love. Following the American and French revolutions, Tocqueville explores the democratic erosion of social hierarchies. He writes that a rise in individualism may obscure “self-interest well-understood”—the perspective gained through collaboration with others, thoughtful reflection, and reverence for truths that lie beyond the dictates of cursory instincts.

In this project, I apply these political theories to the …

History And Memory Of The Old Eighth Ward, Rachel Williams

Student Scholarship

The City Beautiful movement in Harrisburg brought many improve- ments to the capital city, but it also brought destruction to the diverse neighborhood directly east of the capitol building, known today as the “Old Eighth Ward.” Even though this community no longer exists, newspaper accounts of its razing and digital mapping of the families of the Old Eighth Ward preserve this story of displacement within public memory.