Digital Commons Network^™

Empowering Elementary Music Students To Compose And Perform With Ipad, Matthew Martin Massengale

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

iPad is a popular device commonly used an educational tool, yet little information is available about how iPad can be used to supplement gaps in music education in elementary classes. It is widely accepted that music education increases student achievement across multiple curriculums: therefore, any techniques and tools available to deliver music lessons that may close gaps in access to quality music education are important to study and understand. Through qualitative research techniques, this study will examine and analyze the efficacy of using iPad in music lessons. Students will access music history and theory through apps installed on iPad. Students …

Elementary Music Educators And The Mcclosky Technique, Shannon Day

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Despite years of private vocal instruction and coursework on the singing voice, many music educators have not continued their vocal study beyond their former institutional requirements, nor have they received training in the proper use and care of the speaking voice, which has led to the development of vocal disorders and complaints of poor vocal health. This study examines the varying levels of vocal health among elementary music educators as they undergo vocal health exercises using the McClosky Technique. The McClosky Technique offers a distinctive approach to vocal health that emphasizes the release of muscular tension within the voice. The …

Collisions Of Law: Judge William Howard Taft At The Intersection Of Labor, Capital, And Government, 1887-1900, Michael Richard Crill

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

William Howard Taft’s early judicial career has been dismissed by historians and biographers for nearly a century as merely an unimportant preliminary phase before his later political and Supreme Court career. This dissertation challenges that interpretation through a detailed examination of forty-six labor and antitrust-related opinions written by Taft while serving on the Superior Court of Cincinnati and the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. During his eleven years on these courts, Taft wrote a disproportionate share of labor and antitrust-related opinions and engaged deeply with legal problems arising from the socioeconomic upheavals of the Second Industrial …

Breaking The Box: How Pandora's Box Activates And Reinforces Gender Ideologies Through Linguistic Adherence To Archetypal Hegemonic Masculinity, Hannah Pitkofsky

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Mythology, such as Pandora’s Box, provides a strong ideological framework for how our society views certain issues, including femininity and female potential. However, the images presented in these stories are often artificially crafted with implicit biases that allegorize femininity within a pre-established masculine and patriarchal framework, whose core concepts remain persistent in contemporary culture. In this paper, I dissect contemporary English translations of the original Pandora myth by analyzing language patterns and examining their cultural and linguistic implications. Furthermore, I investigate the authorial rationale behind these lexical frameworks through the lens of contemporary hegemonic masculinity. I argue that the current …

Creating Dynamic Protagonists: An Examination Of Character Development Within Book To Film Adaptations, Matthew Chisholm

Masters Theses

The following thesis proposal seeks to provide the process, reasoning, and vision for my thesis project, “Between the Tracks”. This project both begins and ends with character. What began as an experiment into character creation, has become both a critical analysis of character development techniques, and a creative work where I use the findings from this analysis to create a character-driven screenplay.

First, my artist’s statement will begin by describing my vision and inspiration for this project. I will then delve into my writing process in regards to both the critical paper and the creative piece of the project. I …

The Truths Beneath The Story: Internal Conflict, Catharsis, And Psychological Allegory As The Catalyst For Transformation In Screenwriting, Heather Bixler

Masters Theses

The Tour is a psychological coming-of-age screenplay that constructs meaning through the interaction of the main character's internal contradictions, resulting in an emotionally and structurally driven transformation. The screenplay is an original feature-length screenplay that follows Claudia, a 17-year-old girl who finds herself in the Unknown World. There she meets The Heartmaker and discovers her heart is missing. She journeys to Pineville, a town that mirrors her life back home, where her late father is still alive, and the townspeople reflect hidden truths of those she loves. The Tour is a coming-of-age psychological drama with allegorical dimensions. The script explores …

Ecclesiastes’ Framework For The New Testament Doctrine Of Personal Eschatological Judgment, Brent D. Denney

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation examines the relationship between the assertions of divine judgment in the book of Ecclesiastes and the New Testament passages that depict the final judgment of humans. Chapter One introduces the topic and thesis by foregrounding modern scholarship's neglect of the conceptual relationship between Ecclesiastes’ assertions of divine judgment and the New Testament’s mature doctrine of personal eschatological judgment, which underpins this study. Chapter Two examines Qohelet’s deployment of the term הֶבֶל (heḇel) as a tensive symbol for the conditions stemming from the fall and its effects on humanity's pursuit of anything of lasting value (יִתְרוֹן, yiṯrôn). For Qohelet, …

The Multiple Worlds Of Intentionality: Towards The Accessibility Of Identities, Ismail Choukri

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

Accessibility is a cognitive ability that contributes to the reproduction of universes and to the construction of characteristics of the unknown world. Both indicate that they interact in the context of the dynamics of the society of mind that is characterized by the differentiation of patterns; each having a particular identity.

Perspective Of Political Discourse In The Light Of Intentionality And Technological Developments?, Mohammed Noubir

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

In this article, we propose to present some concepts and mechanisms that allow us to understand the functions of political discourse; mainly, collective intentionality and causal effectiveness in the production of physical effect in the context of intentional realism.

The Journey Is Also The Return, Segio Barce Gallardo

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

The aim is to explore a variant of travel theory which, in this case, would be the the journey of return or the return to the beloved country. Even if it is a physical journey, this article tries to investigate and prove that the return journey, especially the one made for the first time after a long absence, is also a sentimental and emotional journey. This article analyses both the author’s own work anda series of books written by other authorswho have experienced the same situation and reflected on those situations in novels and stories. Since the author of the …

The Moorish Ambassador’S Journey To Spain: Cultural Encounters In Ahmed Ben Mehdi Al-Ghazāl’S Natījat Al Ijtihād Fi Al-Mohādana Wa Al-Jihād (1766), Lhoussain Simour

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This article attempts to read al-Ghazāl’s travel account Natījat al Ijtihād fi al-Mohādana wa al-Jihād as a valuable archival material and an eighteenth-century subaltern narrative that offers the re-interrogation of the discourse of the Self and the Other from the perspective of the Moroccan traveler. Natījat al Ijtihād is a travel account that gives further historical evidence about one of the less discussed experiences in literature and annals of history, the abduction of Muslims in foreign lands. Such an interdependent overlap between these thematic concerns and the historical context that fuels up al-Ghazzal’s travel-inspired text would give readers the chance …

Look Out For Our Kind, Christof Koch

Animal Sentience

Strongly supportive overall of Birch’s broad tent Sentience Project, I offer an alternative dyadic, single-class, two-stage process based on estimating the probability for sentience, and the associated confidence, for any individual or taxonomic group. I criticize Birch’s narrow computational framework when addressing the question of algorithmic sentience; there are alternative approaches.

Can An Ai System Be Creative? A Critical Perspective From Art And Engineering, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

This paper examines the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be creative, approached from the dual perspective of a researcher trained in electrical engineering, pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks, who has also spent most of his life engaged in the arts as actor, stage and film director, writer, composer, and visual artist, and in philosophy. Drawing on Margaret Boden’s foundational framework — both her three properties of creativity (novelty, surprise, and value) and her three types of creative processes (combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational) — the paper argues that AI systems are structurally incapable of creativity in …

Ai Is Not The Kind Of Thing That Can Ever Be Sentient, Lori Marino

Animal Sentience

Sentience evolved to allow organisms to move through their environment avoiding harms and achieving benefits. Sentience did not evolve from computation. It evolved from valenced feelings. AI (even robots) are not embodied and are not the kind of thing that needs to be sentient. There is no way to get from computations to feelings. They are qualitatively different things. We should avoid being lulled into thinking that an inanimate object designed to engage our propensity for anthropomorphism, like AI, is actually a mind.

"The First Web Novel At 30: The Collection And The Creative Process", Robert Arellano, Scott Rettberg

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Summer 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Sunshine '69, recognized as the first novelistic hypertext fiction published on the web. While the full work remains accessible online—an "(un)supervised" preservation achievement in itself—the archive remains split between boxes and memory. This conversation between the work's creator and a major scholar in electronic literature documents both specific preservation challenges and systemic patterns in what the field chooses to preserve.

Topics include: figuring out web-born composition before established methodologies existed; the three decades of technical decisions that kept a 1996 work alive through format obsolescence and server migrations; and what gets lost …

Aesthetic Relationship Of The Female Character Design And Peacocks In Art Nouveau And Art Deco, A.L Rawan Reda Atef Elzeky, Prof. Dr. Manal Abdel Rahim, Prof. Asmaa Abu Bakr El-Nawawy

Journal of Art, Design and Music

The Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements (1890–1940) produced a rich visual vocabulary in which the female figure and the peacock emerged as recurring and symbolically charged motifs. Despite extensive scholarship on both movements, the specific aesthetic and symbolic relationship between these two elements, and their collective contribution to the development of character design principles, has received limited scholarly attention.

The aim is to enhance understanding of the visual diversity presented in the selected works, despite the shared fundamental elements represented by the woman and peacock. The complementary relationship between them, whether it is a spatially intertwined and harmonious relationship …

Archival Storytelling: Remembering Our Digital History, Dene Grigar

ELO (un)supervised 2026

In When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Reshaping Our Future, Abby Smith Rumsey argues that memory is required for survival and impacts not only the survival of a species but of that species’ culture. Needed in this “Age of Matter,” as she calls it, are documentation practices that address the way in which physical and digital memory systems can be combined and harnessed to preserve human experience (13).

This paper addresses Rumsey’s challenge. Using the physical and digital archives held in The NEXT’s collections, it introduces archival storytelling as a method for documenting and, thus, remembering …

“Huir Sí Es Mejor Plan”: Rethinking The Subject In Digital Literature, Fernanda Mugica

ELO (un)supervised 2026

As an extension of my research on contemporary appropriative practices that experiment with deviant uses of technology, this paper explores the question of subjectivity in digital literature. My aim is to examine how a set of contemporary works of electronic literature problematize the relationships between writing, technology, and subject formation. Within this framework, I propose a reading of Huir sí es mejor plan (2020), a work created in Twine by Argentine writer Valeria Mussio. To address the question of the subject in an algorithmic culture, it is essential to attend to the spatial modulations (Angeliki 2021) that traverse it: media …

A Modest Proposal For Discourse Analysis In Nonbinary Communities: Method And Case Study, Nikoli Michael Daigneault

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While linguists have long used discourse analysis to study language variation in binary and nonnormative gender groups, nonbinary people have often been excluded from analyses or treated without a nonbinary-informed framework. Nevertheless, nonbinary language use can provide key insights into the relationship between gender and language. In this thesis, I propose Nonbinary Discourse Analysis, a set of recommendations and best practices for conducting discourse analysis in nonbinary communities. These methods are informed by previous empirical research on nonnormative gender identities and theoretical work in trans linguistics (Zimman, 2020) and trans epistemologies (Nordmarken, 2019; Raclaw, in press). To demonstrate the methodology, …

Together//Apart Explorations In Choreorobotic Performance Ontologies, Kate Sicchio, Patrick J. Martin

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This chapter presents a practice-as-research approach to developing an improvisational choreorobotic performance. Our performance process motivated the creation of new human–robot interaction and live choreography technologies. These technologies were tested during the performance and evaluated by the audience through feedback on their perceptions about the coexistence of humans and machines in a shared space. Examining these results through both autonomous robotics and performance studies ontologies, we formulated a new analytical process in which choreographic practice informs design and robots inform performance.

Hacking Stone Moons: Or, A Re-Viving A Still Born Child A Behind-The-Scenes Melodrama In Three Acts., Deena Larsen, Claire Leyden, Quinn Carrick, Jenn Duyen

ELO (un)supervised 2026

ELO 2026 Performance proposal

Hacking Stone Moons: Or, a Re-viving a still born child A behind-the-scenes melodrama in three acts. We will bring you a feat so audacious, so deliriously intricate, it defies the very laws of preservation, coding, and creation.   Program Notes From 2023- 2025, Claire Leyden, Jenn Nguyen, and Quinn Carrick resurrected Deena Larsen’s 1995-1999 Stone Moons saga, written to pour out the frustrations of an ongoing struggle that her friend was undergoing to get support for her  pre-verbal autistic child. Since this was an organic work, deftly mirroring reality and fantasy, this classic hypertext’s nodes and links …

Compressed Cinema As A Study In Llm Latent Spaces, Mallen Clifton

ELO (un)supervised 2026

In his article “Spec Acts” (2021), Matthew Kirschenbaum analyzes the AI-generated novel 1 the Road to develop his titular concept of the spec act, “the future in its multitudes collapsing into an actionable present.” With the proliferation of texts produced by generative AI and subsequent critical analyses of them, one element in particular calls for further theorization: “the future in its multitudes,” or more directly, the latent space. This echoes arguments by critics such as Antonio Somaini, who offered his own “Theory of Latent Spaces” last year. However, where Somaini’s attention is towards visual culture, I turn mine to the …

The Implications Of Generative-Ai User Prompt Engineering Shaping The Absent Presence Of Latino Women Textual Rhetoric In Llms, Angely C. Suarez Dejesus

ELO (un)supervised 2026

This article examines how large language models (LLMs) generate text that affects underrepresented groups, particularly Latino women, due to limited cultural, contextual, and abstraction training rooted in biases. The research draws on Brock’s (2018) CTDA theory, White et al.’s (2023) prompt engineering framework, Klein’s (2015) computational spatiality, and Anzaldua’s (1987) concepts of cultural, emotional, and gendered borderlands to analyze the outputs. Using narrative prompt experiments, Chat GPT 3.5, 5, Claude AI, Gemini, and Microsoft Co-Pilot produced changes in their textual outputs as evidence of further algorithmic designs. Nevertheless, continual biases embedded in the algorithms’ linguistic representation and misrepresentation through the …

Cooperation, Collaboration, And Community In Horror And Suspense Games, Rachel Kerr, Monica Evans, Cameron Irby, Cheri Tang

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Cooperation has been a staple in video and analog games since their inception. From couch co-op to social deduction games, there are few games that cannot be enjoyed cooperatively in some way. Even games that are not inherently cooperative can be played collaboratively, from single-player games enjoyed by multiple people in the same room to PvP games where players opt for teamwork despite explicitly competitive mechanics. In horror and suspense games, cooperation tends to form strong communicative bonds between players. The four papers in this panel examine how communities form in and around horror and suspense games, and how those …

Out Of This World: An Exoplanetary Workshop, Monica Storss, Bart Kuipers

ELO (un)supervised 2026

The workshop investigates how scientific constraints can productively defamiliarize human experience and create new frameworks for creativity and expression. Participants will produce original work while considering broader questions about environment, perception, and cultural formation in speculative contexts, and how the arts, sciences, and technology inform each other in relational multiplicities. This generative workshop explores how astronomical data from confirmed exoplanets can generate new poetic forms and linguistic constraints. Participants will examine how exoplanetary conditions can shape language, metaphor, and narrative structure. We'll develop from writing exercises that respond to non-terrestrial physical parameters: alternative light spectra, gravitational variations, and atmospheric compositions. …

Singulars: Performing The Reverse Turing Test, Halim Madi

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Singulars is an ongoing series of performance systems in which I co-create poetry with a language model trained on an anthology of English poetry alongside my own writing. Across three works—carnation.exe, versus.exe, and reinforcement.exe—I stage live reinforcement loops in which my poems and the model’s responses compete for audience votes. The audience functions as an embodied feedback mechanism, shaping the evolution of both the machine and the human poet in real time.

This paper examines what happens when a poet becomes both author and training data. Drawing from creativity research, metacognition, and social cognition, I reflect …

Connected/Disconnected, Emery Beckman

ELO (un)supervised 2026

With the rise of AI, scholars are grappling with how it fits into their field and determining how authorship plays a role in the assistance of these tools. I argue that AI can be deemed a digital companion to creative and interactive design. Anthropic has recently launched Claude Code, a coding assistant for various projects. This talk explores how agentic AI can offer digital assistance while advocating for human thought to remain at the forefront. This talk will analyze and demo an interactive site and explore a collection of AI-assisted poems built alongside Claude Code titled "Connected/Disconnected." It will explore …

Access Intimacy In The Feminist Classroom: Co-Creating Course Policies, Expectations, And Access Measures As Feminist Disability Praxis, Krystal Cleary

Feminist Pedagogy

In this essay, I outline an activity to foster access intimacy (Mingus, 2011) in the feminist classroom through students’ co-creation of course policies, expectations, and additional access measures. This activity transforms the classroom into a praxis laboratory wherein students analyze the normative structures that shape their hyperlocal classroom context and practice building environments characterized by interdependent solidarity rather than atomized competition. As feminist disability praxis, this activity centers the knowledge of disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent scholars and students; in doing so, it customizes the classroom to a diversity of learners and builds adaptability for responding to unforeseen challenges into …

Review Of "Admirals In Court: Discipline, Honour And Naval Justice, 1778-1814" By John Morrow, Matthew Barrett

Canadian Military History

Review of Admirals in Court: Discipline, Honour and Naval Justice, 1778-1814 by John Morrow

The Bonga Collection And The Carleton And York Regiment Veterans Of The Liberation Of The Netherlands, Mackenzie Smith

Canadian Military History

The Dr. Agatha Bonga Memorial Collection contains over one thousand questionnaires completed by Canadian Second World War veterans surrounding the liberation of the Netherlands and is currently held in The Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick. Focusing on the narratives of three veteran respondents, James Agnew, Donald Smith and R.O. Steeves, this article shows how veterans’ answers to the questionnaires creates a historical record of the attitudes, emotions and experiences of those who served in the Netherlands and survived the Second World War. When these narratives are examined with the eighteen …