Digital Commons Network^™

Carrie’S Choice: Contemporary Feminism And Sociopolitical Constructions Of Womanhood In Film Adaptations Of Stephen King’S Carrie, Molly Brianna Collins

All Theses

When Stephen King published his debut novel Carrie in a post Roe v. Wade America in 1974, a narrative about a young girl with telekinesis captured the fear of what was to come from women with power. In response to the burgeoning women’s movement of the 1970s, King’s novel culminates as a heightened expression of the cultural damage a sexually liberated woman with choice could cause. Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation of the novel follows suit, extending a fear of women with choice by employing the cinematic male gaze to reclaim the right to objectify women. By emphasizing cosmetic …

The Metonym Of Edenic Masculinity: Depictions Of Male-Male Rape In Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl And Property, Chelsea Clarey

All Theses

Health advocate Michael Scarce describes the sexual abuse of men as 'a crime without a history,' pointing to the treatment of raped men as shocking aberrations as an element in the stigma attached to the crime's victims. The presentation of male-male rape as rare and shocking, he proposes, may be what engenders such silence on the subject, perpetuating the absence of such a history. Even in writing about American slavery, in which the sexual exploitation of women is more freely acknowledged, few historic attestations and fewer literary accounts of the rape of men exist. Those rare accounts which do exist, …

Painting Versus Photography In The Romance Of A Shop And Capturing The New Woman Through A Mechanical Lens, Sarah Michelle Naciuk

All Theses

Majority of Amy Levy's scholarship is predominantly focused on her Jewish identity and its relationship to her novel Ruben Sachs. Importantly, very little scholarship has been done on her novel The Romance of a Shop. Both Elizabeth Evans and Michael Kramp have discussed Levy's desire to create a place for professional women in the urban landscape. However, neither of these scholars have critically analyzed the New Woman and its connection to photography and painting, only briefly glancing at Lady Watergate's Post-mortem photograph. By ignoring this scene and the New Woman's connection to photography, they have missed the opportunity to see …

Surfacing Jellyfish For Peanut Butter Jelly, Brianne Campbell

All Theses

This thesis discusses the surfacing techniques and process used in the creation of two main characters and the supporting crowd characters in the short animation, Peanut Butter Jelly. The goal was to create a custom RenderMan shader that could be used for both characters, and that had qualities of refraction and subsurface scattering, to allow the characters to appear soft and translucent like jellyfish. Shader writing in RenderMan, map painting in Mari, and design decisions are covered to explain the way the goal was achieved. The process for creating an interesting secondary character that cooperated seamlessly with the main jellyfish …

Snowedout Atlanta: An Analysis Of How Stakeholders Engaged In A Facebook Online Support Group During A Crisis, Meredith Leigh Morgoch

All Theses

In 2014, snowstorms hit the southern U.S. and paralyzed the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan area. The people of Atlanta and the surrounding areas accessed a Facebook group page, SnowedOut Atlanta (SOA), and some used it to strategically survive the storm. The social media posts produced by the residents of Atlanta before and after the storm provide a rich case of study for health-related, crisis Communication and social media scholars. The objective of this thesis was to investigate the use of social media for the SOA Facebook group through the analyses of wall posts. In order to explore this line of inquiry, …

Reader Interrupted: Poetry As Thing In The Lyrical Works Of Emily Dickinson, Sarah Katherine Melchers

All Theses

This paper stemmed from a desire to place Dickinson's poetry in conversation within the broader discourse of Thing Theory, namely using Bill Brown, Theodor Adorno, and Jane Bennett collectively. These claims derive as well from my own experiences in reading Dickinson's poetry: those times when faced with delightful frustration, enjoyably utter-confusion, followed closely by a frantic desire to understand at all costs. Dickinson's poetry is that which truly 'plunge[s]' us 'for a moment into [a] torrent of sensation' (Santayana 260). Nestled somewhere between my chest and my gut, there is this unnamable feeling that arrests me in a physical way, …

Analyzing User Acceptance Of Mobile Technology In Clinical Settings Through Point-Of-Care Mobile Applications, Leanne Elizabeth Loper

All Theses

The advent of mobile phones has led to global connectivity surpassing any global conversation previously known. However, despite having access to this global network through mobile devices and ever expanding internet access, many developing countries still lack basic medical technology. In many resource-poor medical settings, existing monitors used to process and display medical data received from various sensors (temperature, blood oxygen saturation, heart rate, blood pressure, etc.) are either missing or unreliable. Furthermore, these devices are rarely designed with an interface appropriate for the needs of the end user. Additionally, the use of mobile apps for medical purposes is increasing …

Oscar Romero And The Resurgence Of Liberationist Thought, William David Mccorkle

All Theses

While the slain El Salvadorian archbishop, Oscar Romero, was not necessarily a liberation theologian, he embodied the teachings of liberation theology seen in the work of the Conference of Latin American Bishops and the writings of Gustavo Gutiérrez while also moderating some of the more radical interpretations of the theology. Despite the strong opposition to liberation theology from the Vatican and conservative church officials, Romero's life and legacy has helped keep the core ideas of the theology alive by serving as an example of a more peaceful version of liberationist thought. Because of his 'martyrdom' and his subsequent iconic status …

Tigers In The Trenches: A Study Of Clemson In The Great War, Brock M. Lusk

All Theses

In April 1917, Clemson Agricultural College was a small, relatively-unknown land-grant college. The college had only been open for 23 years, 8 months with an average annual enrollment of 616 students when the United States declared war and entered World War I. By the end of the war, over 821 Clemson graduates and former students would serve in the U.S and Allied military services. James C. Littlejohn, the registrar from 1910 - 1925, attempted to catalog the service of these alumni during and after the war. In order to conduct this study, a cross reference of Clemson students from 1896 …

Visual Speech Recognition Using Histogram Of Oriented Displacements, Sujeeth Selvam Kumaravel

All Theses

Lip reading is the recognition of spoken words from the visual information of lips. It has been of considerable interest in the Computer Vision and Speech Recognition communities to automate this process using computer algorithms. In this thesis, we have developed a novel method involving describing visual features using fixed length descriptors called Histogram of Oriented Displacements to which we apply Support Vector Machines for recognition of spoken words. Using this method on the CUAVE database we have achieved a recognition rate of 81%.

The School Based Health Center Design Guidelines, Anna Kim

All Theses

School Based Health Centers (SBHC) have traditionally gone unacknowledged for their support in providing essential healthcare services to underserved school-aged children. The well-being of these students and their communities rely heavily on a safe, efficient and encouraging physical and responsive environment for successful health outcomes. Literature reveals that the negative health and intricate social issues that face the American youth are stunting growth in academic performance and promoting high risk health behaviors through adulthood. To help eliminate the difficulty in access to healthcare for the underserved, healthcare must be brought to them. The School Based Health Center represents a unique …

Raising Specters: Queer Reclamation In Toni Morrison's A Mercy, Justin Allen Holliday

All Theses

An enslaved individual usually escapes or is manumitted before writing his or her narrative. But what if an individual composes that narrative while still enslaved? Toni Morrison teases out this question in A Mercy, a novel told in part by Florens, an enslaved African girl in seventeenth-century colonial America, who etches her narrative with a nail on the interior of a mansion, exhibiting her resourcefulness and desperation to write her story. However, a third-person narrator fills in the gaps of what Florens cannot know about the other characters. This other narrative voice becomes necessary because Florens suffers from the trauma …

On The Periphery: A Survey Of Nineteenth-Century Asylums In The United States, Lauren Hoopes

All Theses

State and federal government purpose-built asylums constructed in the 'moral treatment' era of mental healthcare, here defined as 1835 to 1900, mark a period of great change in the nation. Establishment of moral treatment asylums occurred between two very different eras. The eighteenth century, in which mental illness was seen as a punishment from God, precedes the moral treatment asylums. Twentieth-century thinking favored a medical view in which mental illness can be treated or controlled with medical drugs. Asylums built in the nineteenth century relied on 'moral' treatments--treatments that utilized no restraints unless absolutely necessary and used the environment and …

"Nine Mahogany Table…Two Marble Slabbs And Stands…And A Cow": The First Generation Furniture Of Drayton Hall, Shannon Marie Devlin

All Theses

When the National Trust for Historic Preservation purchased Drayton Hall in 1974, they made a groundbreaking decision. The Trust took a conservation approach to the house, preserving Drayton Hall as found and presenting it to the public unfurnished. The decision proved to have significant ramifications and as a direct result, interpreting the material culture at the site slid to the side. Drayton Hall has over a million objects in its collections ranging from archaeological sherds to pieces of furniture, yet the collections play little to no role in site interpretation to the public. The first generation furniture (ca. 1738-1779), at …

"A Posture Of Defence": A Forensic Brick Analysis Of Charleston's Seventeenth And Eighteenth Century Walled Fortifications, Jacqueline Don

All Theses

The fortification walls that once protected the bustling colonial port of Charles Town, South Carolina lie buried under a thriving, modern city. After almost a century of rediscovery and neglect, local scholarly expertise in the form of a city task force regularly explore the history and structure of the walls that once played an integral role in the daily operations, survival, and success of the young and isolated British colony. Archaeological excavations and archival research within the last decade have made significant progress in unearthing information previously lost to development and memory. These methods have experienced limitations, however, since access …

Fifty Shades Of Beige: Comparative Paint Analysis Of Three Charleston Parlors, Alison Page Dunleavy

All Theses

This research diachronically examines color in three parlors in Charleston, South Carolina: 35 Legare Street (ca. 1790); 18 Bull Street (ca.1800); and 61-63 Smith Street (ca. 1823-24) in order to determine the impact of wealth on pigment and binder selection. Cross-sectional analysis of interior finishes reveals the layers of paint on architectural elements, which identifies the evolution of color in an interior space. With additional types of analysis such as fluorochrome staining and scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS), the samples also provide insight into the evolution of pigments and binders. Interpretation of the findings results in an …

Building Information Modeling (Bim): The Untapped Potential For Preservation Documentation And Management, Laura Lee Worrell

All Theses

The preservation field has few software programs specifically created to store historic and management documentation. Some programs and techniques are utilized in combination to aid in the management and documentation process of historic resources that include, laser scanning, AutoDesk AutoCAD programs, Rhino 3D, photogrammetry, geographic information system, and even Microsoft Excel. This thesis examines the applicability of the Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry's Building Information Modeling (BIM) to create a three dimensional user interface for tracking and storing historic and management documentation. The case study performed for this thesis employs the Nathaniel Russell House owned by the Historic Charleston …

The Structural And Material Evolution Of Molana Abbey, Ballynatray Demesne, County Waterford, Ireland, Site Wa037-011: A Mortar Composition Study, Claire Alice Achtyl

All Theses

Molana Abbey, a ruin located in Ballynatray Demesne, County Waterford, Ireland, has religious roots in the sixth century but much of the structure dates to the eleventh-century. Molana became an important center of religion and education in southern Ireland. After Henry VIII dissolved Irish monasteries in 1546, the former abbey became a part of the land holdings of Sir Walter Raleigh. The abbey was then converted from a religious to a residential structure occupied briefly by English polymath Thomas Harriot. The structure fell into disrepair until the nineteenth-century when Grice Smyth, a new owner, transformed the ruin into a garden …

Engineering Hospital Discharge Instructions: An Eye-Tracking Based Study, Haley Marie Vaigneur

All Theses

With new healthcare reform initiatives, (e.g., the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) hospitals have additional requirements to reduce avoidable readmissions. This results in identifying the needs for improving the hospital discharge process, improving care transitions and discharge instructions, and increasing overall patient health literacy. In terms of discharge instructions, one of the most influential factors to patients' understanding and compliance with their prescribed health regimen is the document's readability. The study goal is to examine how adjusting the discharge instructions' reading level and using human factors design guidelines can influence a novice user's ability to read, comprehend, and recall …

Investigating Students' Use Of Multiple Representations Of The Arrow-Pushing Formalism, Yu Shen

All Theses

Over decades, research in STEM education has been conducted to investigate how students translate from one representation to another. Based on dual coding theory, multiple external representations (MERs) can be effective when the verbal/linguistic representations are provided along with the corresponded diagrammatic/pictorial representations. However, little is known about the difficulties that undergraduate students encounter when translating between the verbal and diagrammatic representations in the context of the arrow-pushing formalism used in organic reaction descriptions. Chemists use the arrow-pushing formalism to represent the electron flow in organic mechanistic processes. Yet, far less is known about the meaning that undergraduate students attribute …

Making The South New, Keeping The South "Southern": Bob Jones, Fundamentalism, And The New South, Anderson R. Rouse

All Theses

The New South, the period of southern history, lasting from the end of Reconstruction to the end of World War II was defined by urbanization and industrialization. Protestantism influenced the development of the New South by instilling working discipline in the southern labor force. Protestantism encouraged workers to embrace earthly vocations as divine callings, sanctifying even the most mundane activities. Protestant ministers became allies with industrialists and boosters in the process of creating the New South.

The career of Bob Jones, a fundamentalist Methodist evangelist from Alabama, demonstrates the close connection between industrialization and religion. Jones believed that success was …

Value And Truth In Literature: The Critic Versus The Reader From Henry James' Perspective As Applied To Reader Response Theory, Marilyn M. Vickery

All Theses

Based on Reader Response Theory, without an audience and interpretation a piece of literature does not have value and does not elicit a truth. It has to communicate. Further, Henry James in his work is not only saying that interpretation by a reader is of vital importance in creating value and truth, he implies that there are different types of readers and he specifically, in the works cited, seems to differentiate between the role of a literary critic and a casual reader. He creates narrators at varied levels of education and knowledge on purpose to elicit from the reader different …

Gawain The Exile: Reading 'Sir Gawain And The Green Knight' In A Postcolonial Context, Hannah Vaughan

All Theses

In his essay 'Reflections on Exile,' Edward Said writes that the experience of the exile transcends definitions that seek to confine it to the traditionally defined post-colonial period, noting that 'in other ages, exiles have similar cross-cultural and transnational visions, suffered the same frustrations and miseries, [and] performed the same elucidating and critical tasks.' This principle, decisive in the articulation of post-colonial theory, nonetheless finds numerous points of resonance in pre-colonial periods. Many texts completed centuries before Said or even colonialism existed seem to demand to be read within postcolonial contexts. The state of exile that Said describes is one …

The Forgotten Stone: A History And Analysis Of Bermuda Stone In Charleston, South Carolina, Justin M. Schwebler

All Theses

Throughout the historic streets of Charleston, South Carolina there is a forgotten and overlooked stone. It is in the narrow gaps between houses, along carriageway walls, underfoot on garden paths, and in foundations of many historic buildings. The forgotten stone of Charleston is Bermuda stone. This thesis provides the history of Bermuda stone in Charleston, South Carolina. This history was written answering the following research questions. How and why was Bermuda stone imported to Charleston? Who were the people bringing Bermuda stone to Charleston and who were the people using it as a building material? When was the period of …

Identifying The Importance And Performance Perceptions Of Positive Youth Development Features In Camps Worldwide, Chelsea Marie Schwabe

All Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine international camp professionals' perceptions of the importance and performance of Eccles and Gootman's (2002) Eight Features that Maximize Positive Youth Development. Members of the International Camping Fellowship, ages 18 and older and of different demographic backgrounds, were asked for their perceived importance and performance ratings of the eight features on a five point Likert scale. The data were used to create importance-performance matrices using Martilla and James' (1977) Importance-Performance Analysis technique in order to create visual depictions of the recorded perceptions. This cross-cultural, cross-sectional study utilized Importance-Performance Analysis to create a snapshot …

Conspicuous Consumers: The Victorian Department Store And The Women's Movement, Joslyn Mccraw Vonkaenel

All Theses

This project involves examining the influence of the department store and other Victorian inventions on women’s rights. By analyzing the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Emilé Zola, George Gissing, and Amy Levy, I explore the different representations of shopgirls and consumers in nineteenth century fiction and how they connect to modern women in the online community.

One Land, Two American Dreams: Rediscovering The Secondary Dupont Narrative At James Madison's Montpelier, Sarah A. Sanders

All Theses

Secondary narratives are most easily defined as narratives deemed non-essential to the primary interpretation goals of a historic site. Given the established significance criteria in the United States, secondary narratives are currently undervalued and are challenging to address. James Madison's Montpelier in Orange County, Virginia serves as an ideal lens through which to explore this challenge, given that the estate clearly embodies more than one period of significance.

In 1901 William duPont Sr. of the illustrious Delaware duPont family purchased a large area of land just outside of the small rural town of Orange ,Virginia. Located over two hundred miles …

Evaluation Of Prevention And Control Strategies For Human Noroviruses In Long-Term Care Facilities In South Carolina, Lalani N. Jayasekara

All Theses

Long-term care facilities (LTCF) are the most common setting for human norovirus (HuNoV) outbreaks in United States. We identified presence of prevention and control strategies for HuNoV in LTCF in South Carolina (SC) under non-outbreak conditions. A convenience sample of 26 LTCF was visited and directors were interviewed to determine facility prevention and control practices. A facility audit in one commons area and food preparation area was conducted to assess sanitary conditions. Institutional policies and procedures were collected to determine alignment with Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) recommendations and to determine readability based on Federal Plain Language Guidelines …

Encouraging Engagement With Therapeutic Landscapes: Using Transparent Spaces To Optimize Stress Reduction In Urban Health Facilities, Shan Jiang

All Dissertations

Large hospitals are being built in the way that divorces patients from the natural environments (i.e., daylight, natural ventilation and therapeutic landscapes) (Verderber & Fine, 2000). Empirical research on this subject suggests that patients experience physical environment-related stress in such settings due to lack of control and insufficient connectivity with the exterior world (Ulrich et al., 2004). On the other hand, nature has been proven therapeutic in many ways, such as in reducing mental fatigue (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989), reducing stress (Ulrich, 1999), reducing pain (Vincent, 2009). Although gardens are seeing a revival in hospitals in the recent decade, issues …

A Discourse Of Hoodwinking: Falcons And Performativity In The Taming Of The Shrew, Dustin Cleag Mosley

All Theses

This master's thesis examines falconry's usage as a framing metaphor in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. This work provides a close reading of a familiar play in order to address old concerns in a new light by bridging both feminist critique with the newer field of animal studies. Where recent scholarly work frequently ignores falconry's presence, this work recognizes that Petruchio's taming speech and the play's later acts are structured to mirror falconry practices that would have been well known to most early moderns, but are unfamiliar to contemporary audiences. This thesis provides a detailed comparison between the …