Digital Humanities Commons^™

Cuny In The News: A History Of Reporting On The Humanities At The City University Of New York, Jacqueline R. Cahill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project compiles newspaper articles concerning humanities at the City University of New York, placing them on a timeline to establish patterns and changes within media reporting and public perception. The archival research of this project explores four distinct eras, grouped around major events in the history of the university: 1961-1971, for the founding of the university and open admissions struggle; 1980-1990, for the response to the ‘70s fiscal crisis and introduction of the Board of Trustees; 2000-2010 for the post-open admissions era and the centralization of CUNY; and 2020-present, for COVID and a new fight for racial equity. Examining …

An Interactive Walkthrough Of Richard Kostelanetz’S Library, Martin Glick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My project utilizes the visual novel game engine Ren’Py to create an embodied virtual walkthrough of Richard Kostelanetz’s personal library. Kostelanetz is a pioneering avante-garde artist, critic, and anthologist whose work spans multiple decades and artistic practices. This interactive experience introduces users to the astounding collection of 25,000 books that Kostelanetz has amassed in Ridgewood, Queens over his decades of publishing avant-garde literature. While scholars might be familiar with his anthologies such as Scenarios: Scripts to Perform (1980) and Texts-Sound Texts (1980), my project allows users to browse through sample pages of his original “Book Art”.

This New Media Object …

Tradwives: The Housewifization Of The Girl Boss, Gagan Kaur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the reemergence of a particular performance of domesticity in the post-pandemic era, focusing on the rise of the "tradwife" (traditional wife) movement alongside the normalization and spread of Alt-Right ideology through popular social media platforms. It argues that the tradwife is not a return to tradition, but a commodified performance of domesticity built on the erasure of social reproductive labor. Tracing the lineage of the “housewife” from the enclosure of the commons to imperial domesticity and from the “girl boss” to tradwife influencer culture, this project situates the tradwife within a longer history of "housewifization"—wherein women's labor …

Resonance, Jess D. Skyleson

Masters Theses

Resonance is a digital media installation intended to facilitate a deeper understanding of inter-connection within and between ourselves and others, and to depict how our voices live both within and beyond us. The exhibit is divided into two intertwining halves:

Externally, the piece involves creative communication between people, art mediums, and life experiences. This aspect includes the contributions of thirty patients, doctors, and caregivers who responded to one another’s artwork in a series of workshops led by the artist. Starting with the creative writing of patients, this was provided to a group of unrelated medical providers, who responded with visual …

The Ruminating Shell : A Reparative Experiment In Dialogic Writing And Sensory Resonance, Crystal Jiayin Ren

Masters Theses

This thesis unfolds as a first-person memoir, an incomplete record of remembered dialogues, and a structural experiment that aims to get closer to what I perceive as emotional and philosophical truth. Prompted by a conversation with my father-in-law, writer and thinker Shen Hao, I began to reflect on how informal, everyday exchanges with mentors, family, and friends have continually shaped how I translate internal echoes—ruminations, confusions, emotional residues—into writing, spatial, material, and experience.

Rather than adhering to the conventions of academic analysis or formal documentation, I adopt a dialogic form—one rooted in memory, shaped by subjectivity, and open to contradiction. …

How To Walk On Water: Living Through The Absurd, Esther Du

Masters Theses

Set in a speculative world submerged by water, this thesis constructs a fragmented, nonlinear narrative that reflects on survival, memory, and displacement in the aftermath of catastrophe. Through three interwoven chapters—The Outcast, The Researcher, and The World—the project explores the emotional and psychological landscapes of individuals navigating a post-apocalyptic existence where the past is irretrievable and the future uncertain. Using an interdisciplinary form of visual storytelling, writing, and sound, the work draws from personal experience and collective trauma to examine how people reconstruct identity and meaning after loss. Rather than offering a definitive answer to existential …

A Teacher, A Tutor, A Friend: Chatgpt And The High School Experience, Saisha Gupta, Vivek Mehta, Rebecca Kam, Caroline Ehmann, Alma Orgad, Emily Kuang, Alejandro Castro Barrantes, Matthew Posada, Samay Shah, Nikhita Prasad, Tara Pai, Eileen Ho, Shirley Xi, Tianyi Zhou, Elaina Li, Stephanie Wan, Shreya Paranjape, Zoe Dearling, Siqi (Grace) Peng, Aanya Kaveti, Gwendolyn Lowrance, Angela Ziyi Xie, Mira Xu, Adhiti Hariram, Alexa Muse

The Qualitative Report

Given the increasing emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in education, high school students' perspectives on ChatGPT are underrepresented in current research literature. As high school student researchers in an English Language Arts course, we approached this gap in literature by asking the question: In what ways do pressures within high school communities influence students’ perspectives on justifying or rejecting the use of ChatGPT? We interviewed 24 secondary students and conducted a thematic and discourse analysis, coding the interviews through the lenses of social goods (Gee, 2014), Figured Worlds (Holland et al., 1998), and positioning theory (Holland et al., 1998; Ingram …

A Teacher, A Supervisor, An Undefined Self, Alexa Muse

The Qualitative Report

This article follows the experiences and reflections of an American high school English teacher while evolving a single tenth grade memoir and grammar unit into a published student-led research project over the span of 3 years. As a partner piece, this article supplements my students’ published project, titled “A Teacher, a Tutor, a Friend,” that explores ChatGPT and student perspectives through a thematic discourse analysis under the framework of Figured Worlds (Holland et al., 1998); as their teacher-turned-supervisor, I found that preparing 10th grade students—now called the Lexington Student Research and Publication Collaborative—to grapple with such complex material was a …

A Disruptive Innovation: Teaching Students To Take Risks In The Creative Industries, Jessica Hughes

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This article addresses the reluctance of creative industries students to embrace risk in their critical analyses and creative projects, often leading to formulaic work. Drawing on pedagogical reflections, it outlines the introduction of a revised project structure, 'The Disruptive Innovation,' designed to deliberately encourage students to reach beyond their creative comfort zones. This new structure asks students to intentionally disrupt and transform their initial, 'safe' creative work. By applying flow theory and shifting assessment emphasis toward the documented process of experimentation rather than the final product, the approach aims to build resilience against anxieties about failure. This pedagogical shift seeks …

Icanfeel: A Digital Art Activity To Support Distress Detection In Adult Oncological Patients, Marie J. Deschamps

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

Considered the 6th vital sign, distress, a combination of hopelessness, anxiety, fear, and depression, can impact patients’ quality of life, treatment adherence, and mortality. While screening is required in oncological centers, distress remains under-detected. This study examined the use of Icanfeel, a novel digital art-based tool, to complement traditional psychometric assessments such as Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS), to support patients’ expressions of symptoms and distress detection. Hospitalized adult oncological patients (N = 22) engaged twice with Icanfeel and with an active control condition. At various time points during the protocol, patients self-reported symptom burden using ESAS, self-disclosure …

Not Just Another 2000 Word Written Mfa Thesis, Taylor Cleveland

Art Theses and Dissertations

This thesis challenges the standardized academic expectations placed upon studio-based MFA programs, using the process of writing itself as a site of institutional critique. Emerging from a 27,000-word working draft titled Aesthetics of Real, this final text adopts the permitted format of an “extended artist statement” to expose contradictions within institutional frameworks. It resists the assumption that professionalism and compliance equate to intellectual rigor, arguing that true artistic inquiry demands risk, failure, and confrontation with systemic norms. Through works like 3MUSTANGS, Facades of Dallas (Hall), SuperPOD0043: An American Painting, and Babel’n On, this thesis reveals …

Matthew Kinnard, Matthew A. Kinnard M.S., Ph.D.

We Are NIH Oral History Project

No abstract provided.

Exposing Lived Experiences: Eudora Welty's Intersectional Approach To Writing And Photography, Caroline Mccutchen

Honors Theses

This thesis examines how Eudora Welty employs an intersectional approach in her writing and photography to represent the complex identities of elderly Black women in the American South during the Great Depression. Using intersectionality as a framework, this project analyzes how Welty’s work acknowledges the overlapping forces of race, gender, age, and class that shape her subjects’ lived experiences. While documenting adversity, Welty also highlights resilience, agency, and communal empowerment. The study focuses on Welty’s literary works “A Worn Path,” “Ida M’Toy,” “A Pageant of Birds,” and “Cindy and the Joyful Noise,” alongside her Depression-era photographs from One Time, One …

Modeling Literary Connections: Exploring Transregional Resistance In Dalit Poetry, Antara Bhattacharyay

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

Structuring socio-political identities, the caste system (a graded form of hierarchy) remains entrenched in contemporary Indian society. Dalits, marginalized by the caste system, have expressed their resistance through literature, envisioning substantive equality and social change. In this thesis, I draw on digital humanities methods to examine regional variation in translated Dalit poetry from Bengali, Hindi/Urdu, Marathi, and Tamil languages. I utilize topic modeling—a machine learning algorithm that detects latent semantic structures in a text—as a point of departure for poetry analysis. I observe how topic modeling enables newer readings of the poems, revealing regionally resonant and broader Dalit themes.

I Will Not Accept This Rose: "The Bachelor(Ette)," Gender Stereotypes, And Self Perception, Rylie Vann

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Reality television is a cornerstone of modern-day TV programming, and typically features some element of competition, a makeover, or finding love. The Bachelor began airing in 2002, and the franchise that was built off the initial season continues to be a big name in romantically themed reality television. However, the show employs a variety of tactics during filming and while editing that presents a heteronormative view of contestants. The extent of this influence was explored using a mixed-method approach. A content analysis of several episodes from The Bachelor and The Bachelorette was conducted in order to determine how many instances …

Toujours Beaucoup: Representations Of Childhood And Education In 20th Century French Literature And Cinema, Delaney Drury

Poster Presentations

This project explores French literature and cinema with significant representations of education for the purpose of examining to what extent educational ideals are upheld or undermined.

Reconstructing Art And Evidence: Forensic Architecture In Institutional Settings, Makenzie Smith

University Scholar Projects

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a London-based multidisciplinary research collective and human rights agency that uses digital modeling, architectural and spatial analysis, and open-sourced images to investigate and present visual evidence of human rights violations committed by state governments, militaries, and corporations. The team of architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers, collaborates with civil society groups, witnesses, and victims to establish a counternarrative in the service of human rights and social justice, exhibiting their investigations in institutional settings as varied as legal courts and parliamentary tribunals, citizen assemblies, mass media, universities, and art museums. My research focuses on …

Privacy In The Age Of Platforms: How Digital Advancements Are Outrunning Our Constitution, Haleigh Fagundes

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This project analyzes the procedural history of Fourth Amendment doctrine in the Supreme Court. This timeline begins with the 1928 case of Olmstead v. United States and proceeds with recent cases that resolve more modern concerns such as location tracking via cell-cite information, as seen in Carpenter v. United States (2018). Prevalent cases are analyzed through both majority and dissenting opinions to demonstrate the entire Courts’ attitude towards the interpretation. Though more recently the Court has moved towards expanding the expectation of privacy that one can assume from the Fourth Amendment, digital privacy has yet to be incorporated. The research …

Nextgen Humanities: A Digital Art History Pedagogical Revolution, Analisa Soverns-Reed

Theses

In response to the urgent need for more accessible, inclusive, and technologically relevant humanities education, the NextGen Humanities project was conceived as a digital initiative to reimagine pedagogical practices within art history and the broader humanities. Traditional perceptions of humanities disciplines as elite and static have contributed to declining engagement, necessitating innovative solutions that integrate open-access resources, digital tools, and inclusive frameworks. This project developed a publicly accessible platform curating free, vetted resources grounded in artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and open educational resources (OER), emphasizing critical engagement, cultural inclusivity, and technological adaptability. Methodologically, NextGen Humanities combined extensive literature …

A Tale Of Two Women, Cassady Brown

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.