Digital Humanities Commons^™

Three Degrees Of Representation: How Genai Filters, Retrieves, And Remixes Lesbian Film Data, Maria G. Baker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project investigates how generative AI systems assemble, filter, and represent Lesbian film data. Through auditing GenAI outputs across multiple dimensions (text, images, metadata), 3°R explores what gets included, excluded, and transformed in the process.

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Three Degrees of Representation is a public website (https://mgb513.github.io/lesfilm-meets-AI/) featuring an investigation of AI-generated images and texts in response to Lesbian film data. Filtering simple prompts based on Lesbian film titles through the algorithms of AI image and text generators makes visible how these systems digest and remix existing (training) data, and how aspects of Lesbian representation are either amplified or suppressed …

Conga Santiaguera: A Century Of Innovation And Competition, Nick Herman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Santiago de Cuba is home to the island’s biggest, oldest, and most famous carnival.  Any local resident will confirm that “sin conga no hay carnaval (without conga there is no carnival).” In Santiago, conga refers to a vibrant street procession, the music that drives it, and the ensemble that makes the music.  Conga Santiaguera: A Century of Innovation and Competition presents a musical history of the conga from roughly 1910 to 2010.  This project, https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/conga employs an eBook, musical analysis, oral histories, and audiovisual media to show how the conga has been constantly reinvigorated by innovation, competition, and Afro-Diasporic …

Reexamining The Croton Aqueduct: A Ward-Level Microhistorical Analysis Of Infrastructure And Cholera Mortality In 1849 New York City, Alexandria R. Toothman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work reexamines the Croton Aqueduct’s role in public health by shifting analysis from the citywide level to the ward level, revealing that infrastructure expansion did not produce uniform benefits across New York City. When the Croton Aqueduct opened in 1842, it was celebrated as an achievement that would deliver pure water and eliminate disease. However, only seven years after its opening, in 1849, cholera returned with greater force in the Sixth Ward. This work shows that the uneven distribution of Croton infrastructure corresponded with uneven cholera mortality rates, challenging narratives that present Croton as a singular triumph of urban …

Materializing The Interface: Personal Data Feeds Generative Art, Erin Livingston

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Materializing the Interface: Personal Data Feeds Generative Art is a data-studio capstone project that reconstructs elements of desktop and mobile interfaces as handmade mixed-media artifacts, then digitizes them as an interactive website where generative text and images are fed by personal data flows. Twenty-one paper collage windows — built from cardstock, risograph-printed paper, and mixed media — were photographed, digitized, and activated using code to become the interactive surface of a desktop view driven by browser history. A corresponding mobile view renders a corpus of 500 Instagram advertisement screenshots through a risograph print aesthetic, fed by a hand-tagged emotion and …

"Address It Or Suppress It": What We Can Learn About Rpf From Celebrity Responses, Z Maloney-Dunn

University Honors Theses

In a growing culture of parasociality, ways of engaging with celebrities are constantly changing. RPF (Real Person Fiction) is an often controversial subgenre of fanfiction written about real people. This thesis examines how celebrities respond to RPF written about them, using two case studies: the pairs of Dan Howell and Phil Lester as well as Greg Davies and Alex Horne. Both case studies have reacted positively to RPF, but have very different relationships with their audience and ways of responding to them. Through an analysis of various statements made by the subjects over the years, this thesis seeks to gain …

Twitteratura: Digital Social Reading And Active Reception Of Literary Texts In The Context Of Italian Contemporary Literature, Iuri Moscardi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores Digital Social Reading (DSR) as a novel mode of literary engagement, focusing on the Italian project Twitteratura, a series of social reading experiments conducted on Twitter (2012–2016) and later on the Betwyll app. The research situates Twitteratura within the intersection of Reader-Response Theory, Digital Humanities, Reception Studies, and Sociology of Literature, demonstrating how digital environments reshape the act of reading and interpretation. Through detailed analyses of four DSR projects centered on major twentieth-century Italian authors—Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, and Natalia Ginzburg—this dissertation argues that Twitteratura provides a concrete, data-rich demonstration of Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response …

From Seizure To Settlement: Liberated Africans, Imperial Law, And Labor In The Indian Ocean World, 1810–1860, Holly S. Mcfate

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the relationship between British antislavery, imperial law, and labor management in the western Indian Ocean during the first half of the nineteenth century. Centered on the 1821 capture and condemnation of the slave schooner Industry by HMS Menai, the study employs a microhistorical methodology to reconstruct the legal and administrative processes that governed the lives of Africans seized from slave ships after their liberation. Drawing upon Vice-Admiralty Court records, Colonial Office correspondence, naval logbooks, and administrative registers from The National Archives (UK) and the Mauritius Archives, the thesis follows the transition of captive Africans from maritime interception …

Makna Simbolik Dan Memori Pascakolonial Dalam Cyanotype Fusion Dialogue “Trade Of Faith” Karya Budi Agung Kuswara: Kajian Semiotika Roland Barthes, Wisesa Abrar Mufid Munawwar Wahyuono, A. Syarifuddin Rohman

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

The cyanotype artwork Fusion Dialogue: Trade of Faith by Budi Agung Kuswara represents a contemporary art practice that combines cyanotype techniques and mixed media to construct visual narratives of colonialism, trade, spirituality, and cultural identity. This study aims to identify the visual symbols embedded in the artwork and analyze their meanings based on Roland Barthes’ semiotic theory. A descriptive qualitative approach was employed, with the researcher serving as the primary instrument. Data were collected through observation, documentation, interviews with the artist, and a literature review. Analysis involved symbol identification as well as denotative, connotative, mythological, and aesthetic analyses. The findings …

Profil Kemampuan Awal Keterampilan Produktif Bahasa Jerman Mahasiswa Pemula Pada Level A1 Cefr, Femmy Angreany, Arlian Fachrul Syaputra

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

This study aims to describe the initial profile of German productive skills among first-year students of the German Language Education Study Program, Faculty of Languages and Literature, Universitas Negeri Makassar, based on the A1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The study employed a quantitative approach with a descriptive design to systematically portray students’ abilities without applying any specific treatment. The participants consisted of 40 first-semester students from two classes. Data was collected through documentation of the Final Semester Examination results in speaking (Sprechen) and writing (Schreiben) skills, which were adapted from the Goethe-Zertifikat A1: …

Rebranding Untuk Menanamkan Citra Brand Semanis Koe, Novita Priska Anggraeny Matitaputty, Joni Agung Sudarmanto

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

This design project is motivated by the competitive environment among micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the culinary sector, particularly dessert products, which requires each business to present a strong, consistent, and distinctive visual identity. An appropriate visual identity is needed to enhance brand image and strengthen consumer perceptions of product quality. This project uses a descriptive qualitative method, with data collected through interviews, indirect observation, and questionnaires to understand the brand characteristics and consumer perceptions. The design process applies the design thinking model, which consists of five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and testing. In addition, SWOT analysis …

Cyberspatial Cartographies: Mapping Digital Nationhood Within The California-Punjabi Diaspora., Saihajpratap Singh Bajwa

Master's Theses

This research investigates the phenomenon of digital nationhood, the idea that a new form of community is actively produced through interactions taking place within digital social networks and forums. These spaces function as more than repositories of information or cultural archives; they are living ecosystems in which identity is constructed through mutual encounters among members of a diaspora, where shared references, meanings, and concepts proliferate across multiplex networks. The central questions animating this inquiry are: can a nation exist without a territory, and are these encounters producing what we might conceive of as a digital nation?

The Punjabi people serve …

Reviving Revive. Is The Notion Of An Independent Artist An Outdated Concept?, Richard C. Moore Mr

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This article published in Spectator Magazine - online - is a reflection on whether or not a cultural policy is a means of controlling the artistic community and whether there is still such a being as an independent Australian artist. It was published as the 2026 submissions for an update to Australia's cultural policy REVIVE -  were closing.

I Miss My Computer: Online Artistry, Web Aesthetics, And Coming-Of-Age In A Digital Landscape, Catherine Capeci

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how young artists develop their creative practices in a world informed by digitality. Through survey research of 44 art students between the ages of 14 and 22, as well as a process of autoethnographic inquiry, I examine how artists in high school and college relate to digital imagery, web archives, online gaming, and social media platforms, and how these experiences inform artmaking. I believe that art educators should explore how the internet informs aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities, and how these sensibilities show up in young artists’ work, more so than focus on digital media as its own …

Finding A Way Out Of The Filter Bubble: The Confusion Of A Heavy Social Media User, Longwen Miao

Masters Theses

This thesis studies how algorithmic recommendation systems reshape visual perception, aesthetic judgment, and the construction of selfhood within contemporary digital culture.

Everything begins with the experience of repeatedly encountering algorithmically recommended content on everyday digital platforms. On these platforms, images, sounds, and social interactions are continuously selected, repeated, and reorganized by predictive systems, forming an environment in which perception is constantly structured and adjusted.

From this observation, the research raises two central questions: how do algorithmic recommendation systems reshape visual perception, aesthetic judgment, and self-recognition, and how might these systems be intervened in or made perceptible through artistic practice? Within …

Domestic Travelers: Transparent Machines, Hollow Bodies, Hanyi Wang

Masters Theses

Digitization is not a modern invention. Derived from the concept of fingers, this mindset of packing information into quantifiable, interchangeable units sounds mechanical, yet eerily physical. Try to imagine: a ghostly hand with millions of fingers with the same length, likeness, and function. Under the worldview of Digital Narrative, we live in a digital simulation: everything is representable with quantifiable units, fluid across media. Yet under this spectacle of convenient abundance, something is missing. The Unknowables are replaced with arbitrary symbols, while the Uncategorizables are omitted. This is a framework that cannot accommodate human subtleties and complexities. One needs to …

Landscape Repositories: Mapping Post-Mining Narratives In Asbestos, Qc Val-Des-Sources, Qc, Rasha Lama

Masters Theses

Landscape Repositories: Mapping Social Narratives in Asbestos, QC Val-des-Sources, QC proposes the ‘landscape repository’ as a tool for landscape literacy and cultural legitimacy that integrates histories, geographies, and social narratives to inform grounded and place-based post-mining futures.

Val-des-Sources, Québec (formerly Asbestos, QC) is a place whose extraction legacies and material histories are deeply interwoven into its contemporary economy and cultural landscape. The centre of town is the Jeffrey Mine, once the world’s largest open-pit asbestos mine that is deep enough to hide the Eiffel Tower entirely. Ceased in 2012, the 130-year-old Jeffrey Mine and sixty-one other Québec asbestos sites once …

Archives Of The Future, Ka Oskar Ly

Masters Theses

Archives Of The Future is a practice-based thesis that invokes the archive and the future as simultaneous.

This research insists on the recentering of HMong Indigeneity and its own rooted traditions of HMong Queerness and HMong Feminism as ancestral knowledge systems.

They are the medicine. To recover their cosmological capacity is to traverse centuries of systematic eradication by empires and patriarchy.

I treat artistic making, community encounter, memory, and materials as equally valid ways of knowing and as collaborators. Field research from 2020 to 2026 moves through kinship and artisan teachings. It spans Southeast Asia, France, the United States, and …

Operational Responsibility In Ai Governance: A User-Centric Liability Framework, Zhengyang Chen

Faculty Publications

Who bears responsibility when artificial intelligence systems cause harm? This question has become central to AI ethics and governance. Most existing approaches focus on developers, yet this faces serious practical and theoretical problems. Drawing on tort law, agency law, and philosophy of technology, this paper argues that AI should be understood as an instrument whose outputs remain the responsibility of human operators rather than developers. We call this 'user-centric governance.' Placing accountability with deployers promotes public trust by creating clear lines of responsibility, a concern that governance approaches have often overlooked. It preserves democratic accountability by keeping human actors answerable …

Shimmer Methodology: May 2026 Cultural Studies Association Of Australasia, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This webinar presents an overview of the contemporary state of creative-practice research and autotheory before introducing Shimmer, an emerging methodological framework developed through creative practice, postgraduate supervision, and reflective inquiry. The presentation argues that while creative-practice research has successfully established creative work as a legitimate form of knowledge production, and autotheory has legitimised lived experience as theoretical material, both traditions leave relatively under-theorised the embodied moment through which insight first emerges.

The significance of the work lies in its contribution to ongoing debates around embodiment, affect, intuition, and knowledge production within creative-practice research. Shimmer proposes a language for understanding …

The Data Driven Body, Kimberlyn P. Konen

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

This paper examines how wearable fitness technologies function as persuasive digital tools that shape cultural understandings of health. Through a qualitative rhetorical analysis of popular devices such as Fitbit, Apple Watch, Garmin, and WHOOP, the study explores how interface design, data visualizations, notifications, and marketing materials communicate implicit messages about wellness. Rather than acting as neutral measurement tools, fitness trackers promote specific values, including quantification, discipline, optimization, and self-surveillance. Findings reveal that these devices define health through numerical metrics, encourage consistent productivity, frame wellness as competitive performance, and use emotional feedback to reinforce success or failure. Additionally, marketing imagery promotes …