Digital Humanities Commons^™

Classical Music Isn’T Dead: Audience Development And Marketing Strategies For The Mid-Sized American Orchestra, Rachel Ferrara

IPHS 484: Senior Seminar

The American symphony orchestra is widely perceived to be a dying institution. This research investigates that perception and finds that it is largely unsupported. Sector revenue is growing, new households are entering concert halls, and younger audiences are engaging with orchestral music at higher rates than previous generations. However, Americans rate symphonies the least welcoming of any cultural institution, and strategies widely adopted to address declining attendance have been shown to be ineffective as conversion tools. The problem lies in marketing and communication. This project synthesizes sector-wide research and case studies to identify which audience development strategies are supported by …

What Nlp Tells Us About The Future Of Viral Journalism: A Case Study On Buzzfeed’S Strategic Pivot (2016–2025), Gwen Eisenbeis

IPHS 484: Senior Seminar

This project examines the evolution of digital journalism through a longitudinal NLP analysis of BuzzFeed headlines from 2012 to 2025. Using an NLP pipeline, the study applied cosine similarity, sentiment analysis, frequency modeling, and topic modeling to measure changes in language and focus over time. The findings reveal a decline in the listicle-heavy style that defined BuzzFeed’s early success and a rise in shopping and affiliate-driven headlines built around consumer recommendations and curated internet reactions. In 2016, positive language and numbered list formats (“17,” “19,” “best”) dominated engagement, while in 2025, terms such as “products” became the most prominent. Topic …

Hacking Human Attention: Ai Influencers Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis And Behavioral Analytics, Ayesha Aslam

IPHS 484: Senior Seminar

AI influencers are hyper-realistic computer-generated models designed to look and behave like real social media influencers. This study uses Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), qualitative content labeling, and quantitative regression modeling to analyze how AI influencers on Instagram generate audience engagement. User comments were classified into key aspects including Human Projection, AI Awareness, Controversy, Parasocial Attachment, and Exploitation/Spam, with each associated with positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. Post content types and caption strategies were structured into analyzable features, while engagement metrics including likes, comments, and engagement rate were examined across these categories. A linear regression model was used to estimate the …

Ai Literacy Framework, Beronica Avila, R. Jordan Crouser, Katherine Elkins, Lisa Morrison, Jenna E. Nolt

Instructions, Forms, and Toolkits

No abstract provided.

Ai Tool Assessment Framework, Beronica Avila, R. Jordan Crouser, Katherine Elkins, Lisa Morrison, Jenna E. Nolt

Instructions, Forms, and Toolkits

A resource to assist with making decisions about purchasing AI tools

Introduction To Instutition Repository, Olivia Coyne

Staff

Created for promotion to LMU's Instutional Repository. Provides information and ways of submitting research.

Language And Polarization: A Psycholinguistic Analysis Of Political Communication During Trump's Second Term, Andrew Vera

IPHS 300: AI for Humanity

This project uses psycholinguistics—the systematic measurement of psychological orientation through language —to examine political communication from when Trump took office in his second presidency to the start of the Iran war—January 20, 2025 through February 28, 2026. I asked whether elite political language during this period reflects what Robert Putnam calls bonding social capital (inter -group reinforcement) or bridging social capital (cross-group connection), a dichotomy relevant to theory of democratic depolarization. To answer that, I scraped 16,707 documents —7,409 of Trump's Truth Social posts and 9,298 White House, State Department, and Department of Defense press releases —an d scored each …

The Digital Supreme Court: A Meta-Analysis Of Antitrust Retrospectives Using Frontier Llms, Pablo Portillo

IPHS 300: AI for Humanity

This project examines whether frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) can serve as structured “expert critics” in economic and legal reasoning. I built a panel of AI judges composed of GPT-5.5, Opus 4.7, and DeepSeek V4, to evaluate three antitrust merger retrospectives: Carlton et al. (2022) on AT&T/Time Warner, Hazlett and Crandall (2024) on T-Mobile/Sprint, and Argentesi et al. (2021) on Facebook/Instagram plus Google/Waze. Using a 10-factor weighted rubric, the panel scored each paper on empirical alignment, parameter robustness, counterfactual validity, dynamic adaptability, and analytical rigor. I then synthesized the nine evaluations as the “Highest Judge,” comparing where the models converged, …

Confident And Wrong : How Llm Miscalibration Mirrors The Dunning-Kruger Effect Across Ambiguity Levels, Maggie Grespin

IPHS 300: AI for Humanity

Psychology gave us the Dunning-Kruger effect, the observed pattern that a person is often overconfident when they fall in the lowest quartile of that skill’s proficiency. This research is interested in seeing if large language models (LLMs) suffer the same miscalibration of metacognitive skills. Using thirty deliberately ambiguous college-level math question prompts, this research assesses Claude Sonnet 4.6’s ability to interpret each question, provide an answer, and rate its own confidence without asking for clarification. Results show that while confidence appropriately drops at the moderate tier, it rebounds on the hardest questions (0.840) even as accuracy falls to 0.450. This …

Whose Vietnam War? How Llms Answer Contested History In Three Languages, Melissa Vu

IPHS 300: AI for Humanity

As a Vietnamese international student studying in the US, I grew up learning one version of the Vietnam War -or, as we call it in Vietnamese, the American War -in Vietnamese history classes, only to encounter different perspectives in American college classrooms. Taking Chinese language courses and spending a semester abroad in China sharpened this further as the same historical events looked different again through Chinese sources. These experiences made me aware of how language shapes the way information and historical knowledge get presented and understood. Since LLMs are trained on data reflecting many cultures and languages, I wanted to …

Know Thyself: A Conversation That Reveals How You Think: Adaptive Ai Assessment Across Eight Psychometrically Grounded Metrics, Adam Leider

IPHS 300: AI for Humanity

AI's ability to assess human cognitive and psychological patterns through natural conversation is an underexplored area with significant potential, particularly for college students navigating a demanding and overwhelming transitional period. This project involved selecting eight psychometrically grounded metrics, designing an adaptive question bank and detailed system prompt to govern the assessment conversation, building a second AI model to review and correct results before they are shown, and deploying the full application as a publicly accessible web tool. The result is a conversational assessment that delivers a personalized psychological profile, including strengths, areas for growth, metric interactions, and actionable suggestions in …

Face-Work In Frontier Models: Benchmarking Sycophantic Behavior In Llm-Based Educational Tutoring, Nick Chen

IPHS 300: AI for Humanity

Since OpenAI’s famous rollback of GPT-4o for being “overflattering” in April 2025, sycophancy in large language models, which reflects the tendency to prioritize user satisfaction over truthfulness, has become a major concern in AI alignment. Sycophancy is widely recognized as a byproduct of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and deserves attention in educational contexts where such responses to student errors will reinforce misconceptions. This project builds on the social sycophancy framework introduced by Cheng et al. (2025) in ELEPHANT, which applies sociologist Goffman's classical theory of face work to LLM behavior, extends it to educational settings, and raises the …

Whose Ethics? Auditing The Moral Defaults Of Large Language Models Against Ubuntu Philosophy, Davelle Akosua Ampofo-Twumasi

IPHS 300: AI for Humanity

As LLMs are deployed globally, the moral framework they u se matters. This study tested if four frontier LLMs default to Western ethics and how naming Ubuntu, a communal Southern African philosophy, changes their moral reasoning. Five dilemmas were presented to Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.4, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and DeepSeek V3, unprompted and with Ubuntu named. Responses were scored on seven Ubuntu dimensions (e.g., relational inclusion, dignity, reciprocity). All models defaulted to Western individualist reasoning when unprompted. With Ubuntu named, DeepSeek (57/70) and Claude (56/70) significantly outperformed GPT and Gemini (32/70 each). Gaps were largest in reciprocity and relational inclusion. …

Ai Mcat Tutor: Personalized Study Planning, Daily Check-Ins, & Slideshow Generator For Pre-Medical Students, Luke Latterman

IPHS 300: AI for Humanity

Preparing for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) is among the most demanding academic challenges facing pre-medical students, yet access to professional tutoring remains prohibitively expensive for many. This paper describes the design, implementation, and iterative evaluation of an AI-powered tutoring system built using Claude Code, Anthropic’s command-line interface for the Claude large language model, intended to serve pre-medical students directly, whether or not they have access to a professional tutor. The system integrates three components: a personalized multi-phase study schedule generator, a daily check-in assistant, and an AI-driven instructional slideshow generator for targeted content review. Each component was designed …

Structural Silence: When Ai Infrastructure Fails Speakers Of Underrepresented Languages, Avijit Roy, Proma Roy

Publications and Research

Artificial intelligence tools for education and language support are increasingly framed as scalable responses to access gaps in under-resourced communities. Yet the infrastructure underlying these tools—training corpora, tokenization schemes, evaluation benchmarks, and deployment architectures—encodes a set of assumptions that systematically disadvantages speakers of underrepresented languages before a single model is trained. This paper examines those assumptions through the lens of Bengali, one of the world’s most widely spoken languages with roughly 285 million speakers (Ethnologue, 2025; International Communication and Leadership School, 2026), and the structural barriers that emerge when attempting to build AI-assisted educational tools for Bengali-speaking learners in low-connectivity …

Investigating The Interlanguage Fossilization Of English Writing In Foreign Language Acquisition, Ammar Abdul Fattah Habeeb

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

Interlanguage fossilization represents a common phenomenon in Foreign/Second language acquisition. The current study attempted to investigate the students’ writing compositions to reveal if interlanguage fossilization occurred or not. A diagnostic test has been used to collect the data. A sample of this study was chosen randomly from 20 EFL students of the sixth year preparatory schools in the academic year (2023-2024). The findings of this study displayed that two kinds of interlanguage fossilization are found and achieved by students. Morphological fossilization and syntactical fossilization. Morphological fossilization contained (85.63%) and syntactical fossilization consisted of (14.37) %.Low English proficiency led students’ writing …

Beauty Temples, Courtney Obrien

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This photo story explores the profound intersection of physical touch, professional craft, and emotional sanctuary within the independent beauty spaces of Lincoln, Nebraska. By documenting the work of practicing hairstylists, a tattoo artist, and a nail technician, the project positions the modern studio not merely as a place of aesthetic enhancement, but as a "Beauty Temple".

At the heart of this narrative is the intimacy of the artist-client relationship. In an increasingly digital world, these practitioners remain among the few professionals whose work requires sustained, purposeful physical contact. Through close-up photography and environmental portraiture, this project captures the steady hands …

Oliver, Sarah Rush

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

In my audio piece, Oliver, I wanted to tell the story of adopting my dog in a way that felt personal but still relatable. Soundwriting is an approach to writing that treats audio as a form of research, storytelling, and communication. It encourages writers to think about how sound shapes narrative, how voice carries meaning, and how small production choices affect the way listeners engage with a piece. This approach let me do something writing alone can’t always achieve: create a more immersive experience, where tone, pacing, and the natural qualities of voice help listeners feel present in the story.

Through Peaks And Troughs: Visualising The Rhythmic Sentiment Of The Lord Of The Rings, Dimitra Vogatza

Journal of Tolkien Research

This study offers a fresh look at the widely discussed binaries in The Lord of the Rings and examines whether their structure can be visualised. Building on previous research that identifies Tolkien’s prose as structured by emotional and moral shifts, this study makes visible how these changes happen throughout the trilogy, through quantitative means. A transformer-based language model was employed and fine-tuned on a Tolkien-specific corpus to align with Tolkien's semantics and symbolism. The primary methodology for highlighting these binaries is a Tolkien-specific sentiment analysis. A semi-guided approach, selecting positive and negative sentences from the work as contextual reference points, …

The Paradox Of Appropriation: A History Of Media Technology And Propaganda In Rwanda, 1900–1964, Claudia Brown

Journal of Global Catholicism

Scholars of the 1994 Rwandan genocide agree that media technology and propaganda played a role in mobilizing ordinary Rwandans in 1994 to commit genocide. Underappreciated in these inquiries is the history of the introduction of media technology and propaganda in Rwandan society by missionaries, technologies Rwandans later appropriated and applied to a pursuit of self-determination, but also in support of perpetrating genocide. A close examination of the social and political context of Rwanda’s colonial era and Catholic evangelism reveals a variety of motives for adopting propaganda as a strategy for evangelizing and rallying support for decolonization. This article casts light …