Digital Commons Network^™

History, Interactive Technology And Pedagogy: Past Successes And Future Directions, Stephen Brier

Publications and Research

Based on a keynote presentation at the 2012 Canadian Historical Association conference, this paper surveys the state of digital technology and its impact on academic publication and teaching in the contemporary university. Focusing on the dramatic rise of the Digital Humanities in the last few years, the paper examines alternative forms of peer review, academic scholarship and publication, and classroom teaching as they have been reshaped by the adoption of a variety of digital technologies and formats, including open-access, online peer reviewing, use of data- bases and visualization techniques in humanities work, online journal publication, and the use of blogs …

Topic Modeling And Figurative Language, Lisa M. Rhody

Publications and Research

Located at the center of Jorie Graham’s collection The End of Beauty, “Self Portrait as Hurray and Delay” crafts a portrait of the artist, poised at a precarious moment in which thought begins to take shape. Like Penelope, Graham entertains the illusion, if only momentarily, of a choice between bringing a creative impulse into form or allowing it to come undone. A weaver of language, Graham subtly, deftly, but unsuccessfully attempts to delay the inevitable moment in poetic creation in which complexity of thought adopts form through language, and so realized is also reduced. In The End of Beauty, the …

Sexuality, Rights And Personhood: Tensions In A Transnational World, Dina M. Siddiqi

Publications and Research

Background This article discusses what happens when normative ‘global’ discourses of rights and individuated sexual identity confront the messiness of ‘local’ realities. It considers the tensions that emerge when the relationship between sexual and social identities is not obvious and the implications of such tensions for public health and sexual rights activism. These questions are addressed through debates over the naming of male-to-male sexualities and desires in the context of globalization and the growth of a large NGO (non-governmental organization) sector in urban Bangladesh. Methods The material in the paper draws on a research project undertaken in 2008-9 in Dhaka, …

Dearabizing Arabia: Tracing Western Scholarship On The History Of The Arabs And Arabic Language And Script, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

This book is a reference book on the history of the Arabic Language and script, which goes beyond the sole discussion of technical matters. It studies objectively the evidence presented by modern-day western archeological discoveries together with the evidence presented by the indispensable scholarly work and research of past Islamic Arab civilization era. The book scrutinizes modern western theories regarding the history of the Arabs and Arabic language and script in connection with the roles played by Western Near East scholarship, religion and colonial history in the formation of current belief system, which is an essential step to study this …

Age-Related Differences In Idiom Production In Adulthood, Peggy S. Conner, Jungmoon Hyun, Barbara O'Connor-Wells, Inge Anema, Mira Goral, Marie-Michelle Monereau-Merry, Daniel Rubino, Raija Kuckuk, Loraine Obler

Publications and Research

To investigate whether idiom production was vulnerable to age-related difficulties, we asked 40 younger (ages 18–30) and 40 older healthy adults (ages 60–85) to produce idiomatic expressions in a story-completion task. Younger adults produced significantly more correct idiom responses (73%) than did older adults (60%). When older adults generated partially correct responses, they were less likely than younger participants to eventually produce the complete target idiom (old: 32%; young: 70%); first-word cues after initial failure to retrieve an idiom resulted in more correct idioms for older (24%) than younger (15%) participants. Correlations between age and idiom correctness were positive for …

In The Name Of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom And The Promise Of Citizenship, Amy J. Wan

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Queens Library Healthlink: Fighting Health Disparities Through Community Engagement, Tamara A. Michel, Eilleen Sabino, Alexis J. Stevenson, Elisa Weiss, Alison Carpenter, Bruce Rapkin

Urban Library Journal

Queens, New York is a diverse urban environment and home to many recent immigrants and low-income populations, which are known to have lower access to healthcare and are thus at higher risk for a wide range of negative health outcomes. Queens residents face serious cancer disparities, with late-stage cancer detection rates for breast, colorectal and prostate cancers far surpassing national averages. Developed to address such disparities, Queens Library HealthLink (HealthLink) is a four-way partnership that seeks to increase access to cancer screening, care and education in medically underserved neighborhoods in Queens. Through 20 of the 62 Queens Public Libraries, HealthLink …

Metrical Theory And Verdi's Midcentury Operas, William Rothstein

Publications and Research

Both historical and recent theories of meter have tended to assume that meter is a single phenomenon, definable in a single (though perhaps complex) way. Most U.S. theories of meter have been based on a limited repertoire: instrumental music by German composers. Examination of Verdi's mid-century operas, from Macbeth through La traviata (1846–53), suggests that different theoretical approaches may be appropriate for different repertoires. National traditions of composition, depending often on national poetic traditions, may require different ways of hearing and counting, and thus different ways of modeling meter. The metrical theories of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, David Temperley, …

Ecuadorians In The United States, 1980—2008, Laird W. Bergad

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This report examines demographic and socioeconomic factors concerning Ecuadorians in the United States between 1990 and 2008.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: The Ecuadorian population of the U.S. increased dramatically between 1980 and 2008 from about 70,000 to over 550,000 people. Migration increased in each decade and there is no reason to believe that migration from Ecuador will decrease in …

Improving Clinical Judgment In Lawyering With Multidisciplinary Knowledge About Brain Function And Human Behavior: What Should Law Students Learn About Human Behavior For Effective Lawyering?, Beryl Blaustone

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Why Don't They Get It?: Academic Intelligence And The Under-Prepared Student As 'Other', Deborah Zalesne, David Nadvorney

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

\African-Centered Psychology, Education And The Liberation Of African Minds: Notes On The Psycho-Cultural Justification For Reparations, Karanja Keita Carroll, Dereef F. Jamison

Publications and Research

One means through which reparations can be provided to communities of African descent within America is through the creation and institutionalization of culturally enriching after-school programming, African-centered Saturday schools and independent Black educational institutions. Rather than looking to reparations as merely financial compensation for the descendants of the formerly enslaved, we can look to reparations as they relate to the building of educational infrastructures that will impact future generations of African descendants in America. This essay outlines the psychological and epistemological consequences of miseducation that many students of African descent experience within the Eurocentrically orientated education institutions they attend; The …

Moving Towards Adaptive Search In Digital Libraries, Udo Kruschwitz, M-Dyaa Albakour, Jinzhong Niu, Johannes Leveling, Nikolaos Nanas, Yunhyong Kim, Dawei Song, Maria Fasli, Anne De Roeck

Publications and Research

Information retrieval has become very popular over the last decade with the advent of the Web. Nevertheless, searching on the Web is very different to searching on smaller, often more structured collections such as digital libraries, local Web sites and intranets. One way of helping the searcher locating the right information for a specific information need is by providing well-structured domain knowledge to assist query modification and navigation. There are two challenges: acquiring the domain knowledge and adapting it automatically to the specific interests of the user community. We will outline how a domain model can be automatically acquired using …

Extraction From Immersion, Kristina Baines

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Reshaping To Serve Evolving Communities: Addressing Immigrant Needs In The Library, Jen Hoyer

Publications and Research

Libraries face evolving communities and must constantly reorient themselves to serve new needs. This article examines the impact of emerging immigrant communities on library services. It discusses the emergence of library services to immigrants and the diverse faces of these services, which may include foreign language collections, access to technology and connections with local services, as appropriately determined through community analysis. The Atwater Library and Computer Centre in Montréal, Québec is examined as a case study of community analysis informing service reorientation. This article will be useful for organizations working with immigrants or community service providers confronted with changing demographics.

Undergraduate Bulletin 2011-2012, John Jay College Of Criminal Justice

College Bulletins

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Audiobooks In Academic Libraries, Catherine Stern

Publications and Research

The decision by the library of LaGuardia Community College to add audiobooks to its collection led librarians to examine the scope and the nature of audiobook use at other college and university libraries. The author created, distributed, and tabulated a survey that recorded a number of traditional uses for these materials as well as a number of interesting new possibilities and challenges.

One Hand Does Not Catch A Buffalo: 50 Years Of Amazing Peace Corps Stories, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

Stories from Peace Corp workers based in Africa.

Una Aproximación Teórica A La Definición Del Modo Verbal Español, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Contribution Of Set Switching And Working Memory To Sentence Processing In Older Adults, Mira Goral, Manuella Clark-Cotton, Avron Spiro Iii, Loraine Obler, Jay Verkuilen, Martin Albert

Publications and Research

This study evaluates the involvement of switching skills and working memory capacity in auditory sentence processing in older adults. The authors examined 241 healthy participants, aged 55 to 88 years, who completed four neuropsychological tasks and two sentence-processing tasks. In addition to age and the expected contribution of working memory, switching ability, as measured by the number of perseverative errors on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, emerged as a strong predictor of performance on both sentence-processing tasks. Individuals with both low working-memory spans and more perseverative errors achieved the lowest accuracy scores. These findings are consistent with compensatory accounts of …

Moral Mental States: Four Methods In Metaethics, Christopher Alen Sula

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Metaethics has traditionally focused on the meaning of moral statements, the referents of moral terms, and the justification of moral claims. This dissertation focuses on the thoughts in virtue of which our moral statements have their meaning and our moral claims have their content. These "moral mental states," as I call them, are best understood as having both intentional and volitional aspects and, corresponding to each aspect, as having satisfaction conditions involving both correctness and success in action. Put simply, our moral mental states are not only responsible for changing the world; they are responsible for changing the world in …

In Favor Of Teleosemantics: A Millikanian Treatment Of The Intentional Content Of Mental Representation, Pierre Faye

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Theoretical attempts to naturalize mental contents, that is, to explain how wholly physical organisms manage to represent the external world to themselves, are mostly conducted in accordance with causal-informational and/or functionalist approaches based on nomic physical correlations. In 1984, Ruth Millikan and David Papineau simultaneously, though independently, injected new life into the naturalist program by introducing a divergent approach known today as "teleosemantics."

In first approximation, teleosemantics purports to naturalize mental content by substituting for the former concept of nomic correlations found in causal and/or functionalist models, the biological concept of etiological functions resulting from natural selection. Since its introduction, …

The Effects Of Bilingual Instruction On The English Emergent Literacy Skills Of Spanish-Speaking Preschool Children, Zoila Tazi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Numerous studies have shown that early childhood education (ECE) contributes to educational attainment particularly for poor children. Nationally, ECE has gained considerable backing as a viable intervention to propel achievement. As ECE comes to the fore, census figures indicate that Latinos are the fastest growing minority in the United States. Latinos have persistently experienced greater rates of poverty and other risk factors that adversely affect educational attainment.

Multiple risk factors as well as a "cultural mismatch" with a school system poised to educate white, middle-class, English-speaking students, raise alarm for the educational trajectories of Latino children just entering schools. Racism …

A Systematic Review Of The Literature On The Effects Of School Bullying From The Framework Of Jurgen Habermas’S Theory Of Communicative Action, Gabriel Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is a systematic review of the US quantitative, empirical studies on the effects of school bullying for the purpose of determining the degree to which Jurgen Habermas’s social theory, the theory of communicative action, can be used to understand the constellation of measured effects. School bullying is defined as a systematic abuse of power: the empirical literature on school bullying, therefore, provides a large data set on the abuse of power. The review finds strong consistency between the theory and the results of selected studies suggesting that Habermas’s theory of communicative action can explain and predict the mechanisms …

The Jewish Studies Book Awards: A Collection Development Strategy For Non-Sectarian Academic Libraries, Izabella Taler

Publications and Research

Article provides an alternative method of building quality collections for Jewish Studies collection development professionals in small and medium-sized academic libraries

The Tower Of Babel Keeps Getting Smaller, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Some Think Of The Future: Internet, Electronic, And Telephonic Labor Representation Electionslabor Representation Elections, William A. Herbert, Sara Slinn

Publications and Research

Amid the scholarly dialogue regarding amending labor certification procedures, there have been calls for the adoption of internet, electronic and/or telephonic representation voting (IETV) procedures in representation elections. To date, most labor relations agencies in the United States and Canada have not implemented IETV. Three notable exceptions are the National Mediation Board (NMB) and the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) in the United States, and the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB). This article explores the strengths and weaknesses of IETV and the potential for wider adoption of this technology in the representation election context. The article examines NMB’s rationale in …

Revisión De Estudios Sobre Las Funciones De Las Citas En Textos Académicos Escritos Por Estudiantes De Posgrado Nativos Y No Nativos Que Aprenden Una Lengua Extranjera, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

El estudio de las citas, los motivos por lo que se cita un trabajo y las funciones retóricas que las citas cumplen en el discurso escrito, han sido materias abordadas desde distintas disciplinas, entre ellas la Lingüística Aplicada. En el presente trabajo se rastrean los orígenes de estos temas y se revisan más concretamente los estudios llevados a cabo en el contexto académico universitario sobre citación por aprendientes nativos y no nativos de una lengua extranjera.

Summary: The study of citations, the purposes for which a work is cited, and the rhetorical functions that the citations carry out in the …

Transnational Languages: Beyond Nation And Empire? An Introduction, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

This article discusses changes in the conditions under which linguistic repertoires are conceptualized as nationalist paradigms come to co-exist with post-nationalist ones. It discusses the persistence and demise of linguistic nationalism, linguistic imperialism and linguistic commodification.

Open Access And Liberal Education: A Look At Armenia, Azerbaijan And Georgia, D. Aram Donabedian, John Carey

Publications and Research

In the post-Soviet era, libraries in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia have faced increasing budgetary challenges. In response to socioeconomic restructuring and the introduction of private enterprise, libraries have been forced to seek alternatives to commercial publishing and licensing models. This paper will assess the status of the open access movement and of Internet filtering controls in the countries of the South Caucasus. It will also argue that developing open models for scholarly communications is crucial to the strengthening of liberal education and civic participation in these aspiring democracies. Libraries, in their role as providers of and advocates for shared information, …