Digital Commons Network^™

Embracing The Emergent Nature Of Research In Early Childhood Education And In Life, Anna Malyukova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work investigates the emergent nature of research on emotions and wellness in early childhood education and in life. The research discussed in this thesis was emergent and contingent. Through my experiences as an educator, student, mother, human being living through a pandemic, and daughter, I embraced opportunities for research in various fields of my life.

I explore teaching research to early childhood teachers who also became my coresearchers in a project that explores our roles of being teachers | researchers. Together, using a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, we learn about the experiences of those participating in the research projects, both individually …

From Psychology To Phylogeny: Bridging Levels Of Analysis In Cultural Evolution, Mason Youngblood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cultural evolution, or change in the socially learned behavior of a population over time, is a fascinating phenomenon that is widespread in humans and present in some non-human animals. In this dissertation, I present an array of cultural evolutionary studies that bridge pattern and process in a wide range of research models including music, extremism, and birdsong. The first chapter is an introduction to the field of cultural evolution, including a bibliometric analysis of its structure. The second and third chapters are studies on the cultural dynamics of music sampling traditions in hip-hop and electronic music communities and far-right extremism …

Hierarchical Hyperbolicity Of Graph Products And Graph Braid Groups, Daniel James Solomon Berlyne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis comprises three original contributions by the author concerning hierarchical hyperbolicity, a coarse geometric tool developed by Behrstock, Hagen, and Sisto to provide a common framework for studying aspects of non-positive curvature in a wide variety of groups and spaces.

We show that any graph product of finitely generated groups is hierarchically hyperbolic relative to its vertex groups. We apply this to answer two questions of Genevois about the electrification of a graph product of finite groups. We also answer two questions of Behrstock, Hagen, and Sisto: we show that the syllable metric on a graph product forms a …

Examining The Effect Of Longstanding Deafness On Health Literacy: A Systematic Review, Sara S. Payami

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Objective: This systematic review aims to evaluate whether deafness has a significant effect on one’s health literacy skills, and, if there is a difference between health literacy of a normal hearing individual compared to that of a Deaf individual. Disparities in health literacy unique to the Deaf experience are identified.

Methods: A comprehensive search the utilizing various peer-reviewed databases was conducted via the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Graduate Center Library to identify relevant studies published after 2009. Inclusion criteria incorporated quantified studies which commented on the health literacy of d/Deaf communities in the U.S. published from 2009 to …

Counterstories Of Black High School Students And Graduates Of Nyc Independent Schools: A Narrative Case Study, Kahdeidra M. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Public youth resistance movements in 2019 and 2020 exposed the entrenchment of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and classism across New York City independent schools (NYCIS). In order to support the imminent need for schools to provide effective diversity, inclusion, and equity supports that address broad issues of school climate, relationships, and pedagogy, there is a need to better understand the specific, hyperlocal experiences of Black/African Descendant (BAD) students, who occupy several unique, unexplored spaces in educational research. The following four research questions helped to conceptualize the experiences that support and hinder the academic success and long term well-being of BAD students …

Object Expression: Diligent Realism In The Works Of Roland Barthes, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Valeria Luiselli, And W. G. Sebald, John Knight

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the past twenty years, ambiguous yet meaningful encounters with objects have become a trope in contemporary fiction. Collections and archives, found objects and commonplace articles of modern life have especially substantiated literature that engages themes of displacement and selfhood. The method of incorporating objects into these works ranges from explicit cabinets of curiosities to more subtle appearances, but in each case material reality is the conduit for fundamental expressions of character. These authors draw the reader’s gaze toward an object as a way to indirectly articulate subjective experience, conspicuously displacing the central concerns of a text. This study examines …

Indian Classical Music In The New York Metropolitan Area: The Development Of A Transnational Ecosystem, Andre Fludd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the development of North and South Indian classical music communities in the New York metropolitan area from the mid-20^th century to the present. In this investigation, I primarily focus on local musicians from diverse backgrounds and communities rather than internationally recognized stars. In the instances where I discuss famous musicians such as Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain, I focus on how they impacted New York metropolitan area communities particularly and what their success can teach about international Indian classical music careers. The dissertation is organized chronologically, and I highlight vital people, non-profit organizations, historical moments, and …

How Are Refugees Depicted In The Amarillo Globe-News?, Shannon Reimers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research uses media analysis to ask how refugees in Amarillo, Texas, are portrayed in the Amarillo Globe-News from 2002 until January 2021. Amarillo, Texas is a small, conservative city with a long history of refugee resettlement. Researching one town, over an extended period, tells a rich story of how refugees are depicted in the local media. This research is important because while the United States takes in refugees on a national level, the local level is where they settle and become long-term members of a community. It shares what a community resettling refugees has to say about them. In …

Predictors Of Lexical Accessibility Of Common And Proper Nouns In Older Age: Evidence From The Tip-Of-The-Tongue State, Amy Victoria Vogel-Eyny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One of the notable language difficulties experienced by healthy older adults is word retrieval failure, specifically the tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT). A TOT occurs when one has a strong sense of knowing the word, such that the semantic content is accessed, but the entirety of the word’s phonology is temporarily inaccessible. Such retrieval difficulty is attributable, at least in part, to characteristics of the target word. Psycholinguistic features may uniquely influence the semantic and/or phonological stages of word production. An additional factor known to influence TOT-likelihood is noun type: proper nouns elicit TOTs more often than do common nouns. The discrepancy …

Predicting Stock Price Movements Using Sentiment And Subjectivity Analyses, Andrew Kirby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a quick search online, one can find many tools which use information from news headlines to make predictions concerning the trajectory of a given stock. But what if we went further, looking instead into the text of the article, to extract this and other information? Here, the goal is to extract the sentence in which a stock ticker symbol is mentioned from a news article, then determine sentiment and subjectivity values from that sentence, and finally make a prediction on whether or not the value of that stock will go up or not in a 24-hour timespan. Bloomberg News …

Prophecy, Emanation, And The Mediterranean Middle Ages, Alberto Gelmi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the notion of prophecy as a semiotic construct in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on a chronological span that runs from Late Antiquity to the 14^th century. It argues that theories of prophecy offer useful insights in the domain of rhetoric and not just in epistemology, as scholarship has predominantly contended. The first two chapters survey the trendsetting work of Augustine, al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Maimonides, arguing that their semiotic angle on prophecy depends on a structural affinity with the metaphysical template of emanationism as formulated by Plotinus and Proclus, whose teachings went often misrepresented or …

Pedagogy And Love: Preservice Teacher Perspectives, Eleni Stellatos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues for the inclusion of positive discipline, culturally relevant pedagogy, and love in both preservice teacher and educational leadership programs. The significance of fostering relationships in a school community are discussed with qualitative data gathered from recent teacher preparation program graduates.

A Text Analysis Of British Welfare Debates, Emily C. Maanum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This white paper details the process of conducting a textual analysis of three British parliamentary debates. It also discusses the development of Tableau visualizations to display the results of the analysis, along with the creation of a GitHub repository for documentation of the procedure and code, as well as a GitHub Page for displaying the visualizations. Through text analysis, this capstone project examines the rhetoric used by British members of parliament (MP) while debating the creation of a welfare state during three specific parliamentary debates in 1944: National Health Service, Social Insurance Part 1 and 2, and Employment …

The Production Of Russian Vowels /I/ And /Ɨ/ By Russian-English Bilingual Children, Evgeniya Maryutina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is the first to investigate the production of the Russian vowel contrast /i/-/ɨ/ by Russian-English bilingual children living in New York City. This contrast is interesting because the vowel /ɨ/ is not unanimously recognized as an independent phoneme, based on e.g. its limited occurrence and distribution (Kodzasov & Krivnova, 2010; Matusevich, 1976). Additionally, Russian-speaking children acquire /ɨ/ relatively late in production. Therefore, this contrast’s acquisition may be particularly challenging for bilingual children with more limited exposure and variability in their input and is an interesting test case and contribution to the debate regarding the contrast’s phonological status. In …

The Public Innovations Explorer: A Geo-Spatial & Linked-Data Visualization Platform For Publicly Funded Innovation Research In The United States, Seth Schimmel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Public Innovations Explorer (https://sethsch.github.io/innovations-explorer/app/index.html) is a web-based tool created using Node.js, D3.js and Leaflet.js that can be used for investigating awards made by Federal agencies and departments participating in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant-making programs between 2008 and 2018. By geocoding the publicly available grants data from SBIR.gov, the Public Innovations Explorer allows users to identify companies performing publicly-funded innovative research in each congressional district and obtain dynamic district-level summaries of funding activity by agency and year. Applying spatial clustering techniques on districts' employment levels across major economic sectors provides users …

Parental Beliefs And Knowledge, Children’S Home Language Experiences, And School Readiness: The Dual Language Perspective, Rufan Luo, Lulu Song, Carla Villacis, Gloria Santiago-Bonilla

Publications and Research

Parental beliefs and knowledge about child development affect how they construct children’s home learning experiences, which in turn impact children’s developmental outcomes. A rapidly growing population of dual language learners (DLLs) highlights the need for a better understanding of parents’ beliefs and knowledge about dual language development and practices to support DLLs. The current study examined the dual language beliefs and knowledge of parents of Spanish-English preschool DLLs (n = 32). We further asked how socioeconomic and sociocultural factors were associated with parental beliefs and knowledge, and how parental beliefs and knowledge related to DLLs’ home dual language experiences and …

Monolingual And Bilingual Language Networks In Healthy Subjects Using Functional Mri And Graph Theory, Qiongge Li, Luca Pasquini, Gino Del Ferraro, Madeleine Gene, Kyung K. Peck, Hernán A. Makse, Andrei I. Holodny

Publications and Research

Bilingualism requires control of multiple language systems, and may lead to architectural differences in language networks obtained from clinical fMRI tasks. Emerging connectivity metrics such as k-core may capture these differences, highlighting crucial network components based on resiliency. We investigated the influence of bilingualism on clinical fMRI language tasks and characterized bilingual networks using connectivity metrics to provide a patient care benchmark. Sixteen right-handed subjects (mean age 42-years; nine males) without neurological history were included: eight native English-speaking monolinguals and eight native Spanish-speaking (L1) bilinguals with acquired English (L2). All subjects underwent fMRI with gold-standard clinical language tasks. Starting from …

A Lexical And Syntactic Study Of Research Article Titles In Library Science And Scientometrics, Junli Diao

Publications and Research

Title of a research article is an abstract of the abstract. Titles play a decisive role in convincing readers at first sight whether articles are worth reading or not. Not only do research article titles show how carefully words are chosen by authors, but also reflect disciplinary differences in terms of title words and structure between hard sciences and soft sciences. This study examined the lexical density and syntactic structure of 690 research article titles chosen from five Library Science and Scientometrics journals, aiming to reveal disciplinary differences. The result suggested both Library Science and Scientometrics have almost the same …

Signal To Noise: Harmonic Temperaments And Patterns Of Interference, Dylan A. Marcheschi

Theses and Dissertations

An audio/visual exploration of historical tuning systems. Most contemporary Western audiences will seldom if ever encounter harmony outside of post-Renaissance tuning conventions. This presentation highlights some of those pre-orthodox harmonic relationships which existed throughout most of history. The corresponding paper documents correlates in recent advances of acoustic ecology.

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

Wildfires In The Uncanny Valley, Jenna Beasley

Theses and Dissertations

My work considers our affectual relationship to a rapidly changing environment through ideas about the philosophy and representation of nature, materiality, and the uncanny. In this text, I trace my artistic explorations of notions of apocalypse and catastrophe as they lead me to a deepened ecological viewpoint.

Posthumous Painting: On Pigment And Binder, Jameson G. Magrogan

Theses and Dissertations

Modernism brought about a logical culmination of painting, an epoch where logic and reason can no longer attempt to account for or speculate its behavior. This paper considers the perpetuation of painting from an ontological standpoint, documenting its inherent aporia, its relationship to meaning, and its function in contemporary society.

Musical Irony In Selected Piano Sonatas By Ludwig Van Beethoven, Andrew J. Hochler

Theses and Dissertations

In the third variation of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C Minor, Op. 111, there is an abrupt shift in rhythms that almost resembles an excerpt of early jazz. This passage is so seemingly out of place that it appears to be an ironic commentary on the music that came before. This variation thereby raises an interesting question: how can irony play a role in music?

In an attempt to answer this question, this thesis examines the aesthetic property of irony, suggesting ways in which might be understood to impact three piano sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven: namely, his …

Home, It Turns Out, Is Always A Matter Of Paperwork, Leonardo Madriz

Theses and Dissertations

A meandering of life-thinking on notions of migration & diaspora, assimilation, place & home, family & loss, cruel optimism and new imaginaries - through text, film & video, installation, and expanded cinema.

Thinking And Talking About Kinds, Ye Ji Seoung

Theses and Dissertations

Three experiments investigated whether definite singular generics (e.g., the dog barks) require that the kind does not contain multiple subkinds. No effect of generic form was found in experiment 1 and 3. However, experiment 2 found people thought there were fewer subkinds when definite singulars referred to the kind.

Representation Of Sex-Linked Properties: Implications For Conceptual Representation And Generics, Olga A. Leus

Theses and Dissertations

Four experiments provide evidence that we represent principled connections between kinds and sex-linked properties such that one type of instance of the kind has a principled connection for the presence of the property and the other type has a principled connection for the absence of that property.

Understanding The Nature And Dimensions Of Litigation Crowdfunding: A Visual Analytics Approach, Viju Raghupathi, Jie Ren, Wullianallur Raghupathi

Publications and Research

The escalating cost of civil litigation is leaving many defendants and plaintiffs unable to meet legal expenses such as attorney fees, court charges and others. This significantly impacts their ability to sue or defend themselves effectively. Related to this phenomenon is the ethics discussion around access to justice and crowdfunding. This article explores the dimensions that explain the phenomenon of litigation crowdfunding. Using data from CrowdJustice, a popular Internet fundraising platform used to assist in turning legal cases into publicly funded social cases, we study litigation crowdfunding through the lenses of the number of pledges, goal achievement, target amount, length …

Gifts From The Dark: Learning From The Incarceration Experience [Chapter 12], Joni Schwartz, John R. Chaney

Publications and Research

While in no way supporting the systemic injustices and disparities of mass incarceration, Gifts from the Dark: Learning from the Incarceration Experience argues that we have much to learn from those who have been and are in prison. Schwartz and Chaney profile the contributions of literary giants, social activists, entrepreneurs, and other talented individuals who, despite the disorienting dilemma of incarceration, are models of adult transformative learning that positively impact the world. The authors interweave narratives with both qualitative and quantitative research references to analyze the role of solitude, writing, non-verbal communication; race and gender; physical exercise; education; technology; family …

Testimonio And Counterstorytelling By Immigrant-Origin Children And Youth: Insights That Amplify Immigrant Subjectivities, Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Wendy Barrales

Publications and Research

This article seeks to amplify our scholarly view of immigrant identity by centering the first-person narratives of immigrant-origin children and youth. Our theoretical and methodological framework centers on testimonio—a narrative practice popularized in Latin American social movements in which an individual recounts a lived experience that is intended to be representative of a collective struggle. Our goal is to foreground first-person narratives of childhood as told by immigrant-origin children and youth in order to gain insight into what they believe we should know about them. We argue for the power of testimonio to communicate both extraordinary hardship and everyday experiences …

Silent Film: A Visual Narrative For Developing Linguistic Competence, Patricia George

Open Educational Resources

Visual narratives in silent films are an effective method for developing linguistic competence in English language education and are equally constructive in developing critical thinking skills across disciplines. “Silent film, more than any other film property, capitalizes on ESL students’ visual literacy, using it as both a foundation and a catalyst for honing the verbal language skills that are key to acquiring and articulating complex knowledge in English” (Kasper and Singer, 2001). Silent films rely on the power of vivid, interactive visual imagery to depict personal struggles, character interactions, and plot development. This medium grabs the attention of ESL students …