Digital Commons Network^™

Reconfiguring A Black American Identity: The Art Of Amy Sherald, Cornelia Stokes

Theses - ALL

This thesis engages the concept of identity in the representation and presentation of Black Americans. It counters historical moments like the Black Arts Movement, whose artists aimed to speak directly to the needs and aspirations of Black Americans by demanding recognition from white power on its own terms. This thesis explores contemporary artist Amy Sherald, whose portraiture explores social and political contexts that limit the expressiveness of the Black American subject. It considers how, through the method of reconfiguration, Sherald exudes an imaginative interior of American Blackness not privy to the public, how her figures' pensive and assertive gazes disobey …

Living Memories: Rethinking Remembrance, Timothy Mulhall

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis will interrogate conventional types and methods of memorialization, challenging the memorial as a complete product. Developing from inquiries into alternative acts of commemoration, this investigation will seek to conceive a memorial in the making. Memorials must be alive, changing, constantly developing as a result of interaction. The reliance on overly abstract, rhetorical conditions of design will become obsolete. The static condition of the image-friendly object will be replaced with a dynamism influenced by time and participation.

Connection Magazine, Spring 2021, Cristina Hatem

Newsletters from University Library - Library Connection

No abstract provided.

Moving Towards Equitable Education For Immigrant And Refugee Students, Brenna Hart

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

No abstract provided.

Relearning Lockerbie, Trevor Rittman

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

No abstract provided.

The Happy Bakery: Creating An Accessible Experience For People With Chronic Illnesses And Food Allergies, Talia Trackim

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

No abstract provided.

Creating Visual Metaphors By Taking Tarot Out Of Context, Dani Pendergast

Theses - ALL

This thesis paper aims to describe how using tarot aspects outside of the tarot context can spark visual metaphors in illustration. Tarot, while famously known for as a tool of determining one's fate, is also a source of the many intricacies of the human experience. The 22 Major Arcana cards' meanings were analyzed, and key phrases from those cards were used as prompts to illustrate. The intention was that the key phrases from the tarot cards could help initiate creative thought and ideas for developing illustrations. The thesis starts with an introduction to common struggles that illustrators have with coming …

Multimodality In The Art & Media Arts Classroom: A Qualitative Study Of Multimodal Literacies As They Appear In Art & Media Educator Classroom Curriculum And Practice, Kathleen M. Maniaci

Dissertations - ALL

As a visual arts educator, I understand the unique opportunities students have to learn by making, inventing, and creating, to communicate their ideas. The work of the New London Group (2000), the more recent National Core Arts Standards and the National Core Media Arts Standards (2014) and the New York Arts & Media Arts Standards (2017) have significantly influenced this study by reinforcing both the necessity and potential to both art and media arts teaching practices in developing greater applications for multimodal literacy theory, defined by the National Council of the Teachers of English as “Integration of multiple modes of …

Living Memories: Rethinking Remembrance, Timothy Mulhall

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis will interrogate conventional types and methods of memorialization, challenging the memorial as a complete product. Developing from inquiries into alternative acts of commemoration, this investigation will seek to conceive a memorial in the making. An ever-changing memorial that embraces temporality and the process of becoming will offer a new way of rendering remembrance in the built environment.

Levitation — An Innovative Tea Brand, Hangyi Zhou

Theses - ALL

Currently, Americans are suffering from stress; therefore, consumers have a high interest and demand in beverages that provide relaxation and stress relief. As a naturally relaxing drink, tea is becoming popular in the United States. However, people have associated tea with relaxation by experiencing the various steps of the brewing and drinking process. In this article, market research and a content analysis were conducted to evaluate the existing tea products in the U.S. market. The result reveals a vital market gap: there is no ready-to-drink tea product for tea drinkers to relieve stress, even though tea is the best positioned …

Digital Visual Political Communication: Social Media Imagery Of The 2020 Presidential Election, Sophie Estep

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

No abstract provided.

"Fips" And His Eels: Fish Skin In Bookbinding, Peter D. Verheyen

Librarian Publications

While fish skin, generally tanned, has been used in binding for decorative elements such as in- or on-lays and to create protective wrappers for books, it has a long history of use for clothing, sword handles, objets d’art, and other applications, as well. Plentiful, strong, and visually quite interesting, its preparation can take the form of drying (parchment) or various tanning methods. Geographically, its use has been most prevalent in northern climes where the skins are less likely to rot because of lower temperatures. Most common have been oceanic species. This article provides an overview of fish skin as a …

How Can The History Museums Be Engaging For Generation Z? -A Mobile App Which Can Collect Historical Stories From History Museums, Yumeng Yang

Theses - ALL

The museum is a cultural place for people to broaden their horizons and it is also an essential environment for informal learning. However, due to our fast-paced lifestyle and diverse forms of entertainment, needs are increasingly varied, and museums face many challenges. Many people, especially young people like Generation Z (a group of people who were born between the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s), are not interested in static exhibitions with tedious and wordy interpretations. Therefore, building the connection between Generation Z and making history museums more engaging is crucial. The goal of my project is to identify the engaging elements …

Beyond The Banlieue: French Postcolonial Migration & The Politics Of Sub-Saharan Identity, Kishauna Elaine Soljour

Dissertations - ALL

“Beyond the Banlieue: French Postcolonial Migration & the Politics of a Sub-Saharan Identity” details and historicizes the interstitial area between French state acculturation policies and the lived experience of Afro-French residents from 1945-2018. The project uses oral histories from Black communities in Paris to reveal a rich legacy of sociopolitical, economic and cultural efforts to navigate and negotiate this divide. These narratives offer an alternative perspective to prevailing scholarly and popular discourses emphasizing decline, resentment, intractability and rebellion as the defining features of French race relations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. This dissertation examines the attempts and …

How High School English Teachers Make Sense Of And Instruct With Narrative Film In The English Classroom, Joseph Goldberg

Dissertations - ALL

Although English teachers have integrated narrative film into their classroom instruction for over a century, the medium remains highly vulnerable to suspicion of its pedagogic value. While film has become ubiquitous in the English classroom, training for teachers in instructing with the medium remains nearly non-existent. This has led to the regular misuse of film as a time-filler, babysitter, reward, or mere break for student and teacher, alike. Such malpractice has only reinforced skepticism of film’s instructional value in the classroom despite the ample scholarly literature supporting its inherently cognitive nature and literary and linguistic likeness. Though film has been …

Ones Tenebris: The Dark Ones, Jason Matthew Cheney

Theses - ALL

I love monsters and all the things that go bump in the night! I have recently begun creating the body of work that I am really excited about, reflecting on my time as an adolescent, only now, armed with sharper skills and a wider palate of ideas. This new work has culminated into a new series entitled, Ones Tenebris. This work represents a collection of creatures and their settings that haunt my inner Sanctum Santorum. It is composed of beasts that dwell on the threshold of my nightmares and dreamscapes, a world beyond the veil of humanity.

The body of …

Emoji Disorder: Using A Universal Digital Dialect To Enhance Architectural Communication, Doria Miller

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The rise of digital communication has intertwined visual and textual information. As language continually updates to include pictograms, there is potential to update the language of architecture using these visual icons. Emojis are finding their way into our day-to-day vocabulary. In 2015, the word of the year, selected by Oxford Dictionaries, was the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji. These amicable emoticons tap into the architectural conversations from Learning from Las Vegas of the duck (symbol) and the decorated shed (signage) and themes of iconography as in Somol’s Green Dots 101. As emojis are not grounded in a specific verbal …

Wearing Two Hats: A Virtual Reality Experience Of College Life From The Perspective Of First-Generation College Students Who Are First-Generation Americans, Lorena Kanzki

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Wearing Two Hats is a 360, virtual reality video filmed in point-of-view style to immerse viewers into the experiences of first-generation Americans who are the first in their families to attend college. These students can be seen as wearing two hats as they hold two first-generation identities, meaning they must undergo both projects of acclimating to the United States and acclimating to college life at a starting point that is likely behind their peers. This video is intended to be watched in a virtual reality headset. Once wearing the headset, the viewer becomes the main character, a first-generation college student …

Creating Sustainable Brands: How The Green 4 Ps Influence Consumers' Attitudes Toward Brands, Julia Dipersio

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

No abstract provided.

Wearing Teo Hats: A Virtual Reality Experience Of College Life From The Perspective Of First-Genereation College Students Who Are First-Generation Americans, Lorena Kanzki

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

No abstract provided.

Emoji Disorder: Using A Universal Digital Dialect To Enhance Architectural Communication, Doria Miller

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

No abstract provided.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same: Educational And Disciplinary Backgrounds Of American Librarians, 1950-2015, Rachel Ivy Clarke, Young-In Kim

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Discussions of diversity in American librarianship usually focus on gender or ethnicity, but historical studies also show a lack of diversity in educational and disciplinary backgrounds. Librarians traditionally hail from the humanities, especially English and history. But as current educational attention shifts to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, are librarians reflecting this change? Anonymized data from ALA-accredited graduate programs from the last five years was collected, coded, and classified to determine librarians’ educational and disciplinary backgrounds and in what ways, if any, they differ from the past 65 years and from the contemporary U.S. general population. Unsurprisingly, we …

[Ar] You Ready?, Trang Tran

Architecture Senior Theses

This project challenges the obsolete existence of signage and billboards and seeks to explore how augmented reality (AR) advertisements change the relationship between signage and buildings.

Reading Between The Pictures: Documenting Economic Hardship In A Neoliberal Age, Pamela Ann Barker

Theses - ALL

ABSTRACT:

This thesis is interested in the ways that documentary photojournalism of economic hardship has changed in response to a neoliberal context. Analysis is centered on photographer Anthony Suau’s photo essay “Struggling Cleveland,” captured for TIME magazine in 2008. Suau’s photographs of economic hardship break from a tradition of photojournalism that focused on drama and emotion. I consider what appears and does not appear in the photographs, with particular attention to how the neoliberal context influences the content and mode of address of the photos. The photographs are analyzed independently for the ways that neoliberalism appears within each frame and …

The Burning Building | Fire As Place, Winnie Tu

Architecture Senior Theses

The importance of fire in human social evolution is widely acknowledged but the extent of its impact is not fully explored. Generally, it is connected to energy, light, purification, illumination, creation, destruction and metamorphosis. Fire’s paradoxical nature has built up many societies throughout human history and has been the primary social driver within communities. Due to technological advances, its energy has been transformed into a distant element which is being used discretely in industrial buildings, hidden under basements, or replaced by other forms of energy. Now, heat, energy, and light is readily available anywhere at any time, eliminating the biological …

Personal Memory And Digital Mobile Media: How A Product And A Web Platform Can Improve Digital Memory Archiving, Sarah Folger

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Our technology has been evolving so rapidly and our ability to capture our moments has been become so accessible, we are creating hundreds of thousands of digital files. When we were operating with analog methods of memory making and archiving it was much easier to organize our files because we had fewer or them and they were often all sentimental because of their value. Today, it is hard to distinguish between all of our digital files to determine which ones are most important and even to determine where they are. The creation of social media has created an interesting dynamic …

Textual Curation, Krista Kennedy

Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition - All Scholarship

This article explores textual curation as a conceptualization of authorship and composition within large information structures that is heavily based on the canon of arrangement. This work is often undertaken through distributed collaboration, thus complicating traditional conceptions of authorial attribution and agency. Central curatorial processes include critical recomposition of prior texts along with the development of small and often invisible textual elements such as architecture, metadata, and strategic links. I offer a grounded definition of textual curation that draws from traditional curatorial fields such as Museum Studies and Library Science as well as Writing Studies’ own subfield of Technical Communication, …

The Burning Building, Winnie Tu

Architecture Thesis Prep

When fire is controlled, research confirms that hearth and campfires induce relaxation as part of a multi sensory, absorptive, and social experience. Because fire ties heavily with community formation, this thesis aims to directly re-introduce the element of fire as a social phenomenon measured through four scales of human proxemics: public, social, personal, and intimate. Since fire involves flickering light, crackling sounds, warmth, and has a distinctive smell, the architecture will be designed around the exploration of these characteristics and its spatial qualities through the control of construction as well as heat and light dissipation to result in the design …

The Image Machine, Jeremy Min Burns

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture has always been an image machine. From the Lascaux cave paintings to the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to the multimedia installations of the Eameses to the early projects of Diller Scofidio, images and architecture have cohabited persistently and productively for centuries. However, since the dawn of the digital age, the ontological status of images has changed; and in turn so has the relationship between images and architecture. Rather than being anchored to a specific material support, images exist as manipulable data. While some have viewed the digital turns as the transcendence of information beyond the human subject, an era of …

Web Communications On Corporate Social Responsibility Of Chinese And United States Fortune 500 Companies, Yijing Liu

Dissertations - ALL

This paper uses content analysis to compare corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication strategies on the websites of Fortune 500 companies both in China and the United States. This study aims to determine how CSR communication strategies differ between China and the United States by comparing the purpose, main stakeholders, types of CSR programs, compliance with the International CSR standards, and the existence of CSR annual reports. This study is based on recent discussion and theory-building efforts in public relations literature regarding evolving CSR practices. The overarching theoretical framework will be the so-called stakeholder theory and CSR communication strategy. The results …