Digital Commons Network^™

Aurality As Methexis And The Rise Of Castilian Literature: The Case Of The Siete Partidas, Maristela Verastegui

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Participation is the engine of cultural production. In the case of literature, the privileged modality that enables participation is auditory perception. In order to articulate a theory of literary cultural production based on auditory perception, participation needs to be analyzed in the context of Platonic methexis, understood as an embodied experience facilitated by brain mechanisms of sensory processing and cognition, which manifest in specific ways in written texts. The Siete Partidas, the first complete and systematic legal code of the Western World, provides the perfect case study to test a theory of literary cultural production based on methexis via …

A Discourse Of True And False: An Analysis Of The Publications Of The Afl-Cio Between 1955-1965 As Archived In The Tamiment Library, John J. Gorham Jr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1955 the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations healed their twenty-year schism. Provisions of the NIRA and the Wagner Act had given promising opportunities for union organization in the early 1930’s. Unions in coal and steel saw possibilities in organizing vertically entire industries, rather than according to traditional crafts. In 1935 some unions left the AFL to form more aggressive organizations under the banner of the newly formed CIO. The public perception of aggressive strikes led to anti-labor laws, most noticeably the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. The increasingly hostile political climate, as states enacted the “right …

Libraries And The Missing Narrative: Practitioner Explorations In The Use Of Design Psychology And Environmental Autobiography For Library Buildings And Designs, Amy Beth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Environmental Autobiography as a research method of Environmental Psychology and Design Psychology informs this study of the meaning and experiences of libraries described by six library-building design practitioners. Participants were guided through an adaptation of Toby Israel’s (2010) Design Psychology Toolbox (hereafter known as the DPT or the “Toolbox”) exercises. The research is intended to expand the practice of designing libraries as places and spaces where social and emotional affordance is supported. Emphasizing the significance of libraries as place and space where people often have rich and even transformative experiences serves to augment use-efficiency and evidence-based space planning. Primary goals …

Revisiting Lockhart: A Case For A Conditional Operator, Eric J. Tsai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis presents a case for a binary modal conditional operator compatible with both circumstantial and epistemic modal bases. Certain contexts involving might conditionals require might to take wide-scope over a conditional proposition. A restrictor-view analysis of conditionals is unable to derive both the intuitive meaning of the might conditional and the necessary conditional proposition without positing a covert circumstantial necessity modal. However, based on observations of the temporal orientation of conditionals, such a modal lacks independent motivation. On the other hand, a binary modal conditional operator not only provides the necessary conditional proposition but is also able to derive …

Nursing Students At The Helm: A Study Of The Effect Of A Health Literacy Module (Helm) On The Health Literacy Knowledge, Skills And Attitudes Of Pre-Licensure Baccalaureate Nursing Students, Joy G. Borrero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Effective communication is a foundation of high-quality, patient-centered health care. Understanding health literacy is an essential attribute that health care professionals need to possess in order to promote effective partnerships with patients and their significant others. Nurses, especially, need to be involved in addressing the epidemic problem of low health literacy in the United States because they are responsible for the majority of patient, caregiver and community health education and communication. Nurses play a key role in providing health care information to individuals, families and groups in a variety of settings and therefore should be educated about the essentials …

Motivating Morphological Constituents: A Learning-Based Analysis Of Hebrew, Navajo, And Spanish, Ignacio Lorenzo Montoya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In both description and theory, a variety of linguistic structures have been posited to account for a multitude of linguistic patterns. In the sub-field of morphology, such units include roots, stems, and morphemes. Previous research that has explored the motivation for linguistic structures and constructs in phonology and syntax has raised questions about the nature of these linguistic structures and constructs. Such work, however, has not focused on morphological constituent structure, a gap which the present dissertation addresses through a focused examination of the evidence motivating morphological constituents in Hebrew, Navajo, and Spanish.

The theoretical framework of this dissertation follows …

A New Approach To The Analysis Of Timbre, Megan L. Lavengood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two distinct approaches to timbre analysis exist, each with complementary strengths and limitations. First, music theorists from the 1980s adopt a positivist mindset and look for ways to quantify timbral phenomena, often using spectrograms, while avoiding any cultural dimensions in their work. Second, writings of the past five years focus on the cultural aspects of timbre but make no use of spectrograms. This dissertation builds upon these two approaches by synthesizing them: discussion is grounded in spectrogram analysis, but situated within a broad cultural context, through interactions with listener experience and ethnographic study of music periodicals and other published interviews. …

Scientifically Responsible Metaphysics: A Program For The Naturalization Of Metaphysics, Amanda Bryant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There has been much recent work calling for the naturalization of metaphysics, including most famously James Ladyman and Don Ross’ polemic, Every Thing Must Go. But much work remains to adequately articulate and motivate the call to naturalize metaphysics. My dissertation contributes to that work. Its central questions are: What relationship should metaphysics have to current science? Must good metaphysics be responsive to current science, and if so, how? Why should metaphysics be naturalized and what should its naturalization consist in?

I argue, first, that for that for epistemic purposes, as opposed to heuristic or pragmatic purposes, theories should …

Musicalization: Early Childhood Music Access, Discourse, And Praxis In Nyc Charter Schools, 2014-2015, Andrew Aprile

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past two decades, charter schools have become a hallmark of education reform in the United States. Concurrent with this movement is the increasing prominence of high stakes testing. While much research has sought to compare the effectiveness of charter schools and traditional public schools in terms of standardized assessments, scant attention has been paid to the role of arts and music in charter schools, and little has been done to distinguish the distinct strands of the charter school movement. Given what we know about the importance of music education and the growth of charter schools, it was the …

Syntax And Semantics Of Perceptual Representation, James K. Quilty-Dunn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a defense of perceptual pluralism, the thesis that perceptual systems deliver multiple types of representations including those used in thought. In particular, it argues that perceptual systems output iconic (i.e., image-like, analog) representations as well as discursive (i.e., language-like, digital) states. A central thesis is that perceptual representations of objects are propositional and composed of concepts. It also develops a compositional syntax of iconic representation called the coordination model, according to which icons are sets of primitive parts, each of which determines values along multiple analog feature dimensions simultaneously. The dissertation supports the conclusion that perceptual …

A Discussion Of Delimitative In Mandarin Chinese, Qi Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates how delimitative marking in Mandarin Chinese is better considered as an instance of verb-phrase modification instead of aspect marking. The study investigates data with verb reduplication cases caused by delimitative marking from both syntactic and semantic points of view. Through observations and analyses, it is found that delimitative marking does not have the same distribution as other aspect markers, but rather shows resemblance to temporal modifiers syntactically. Semantically, instead of providing a viewpoint as other aspect markers do, delimitative indicates the temporal length (shortness) of the event. In addition, it is found that delimitative marking has strict …

Transferring Paremias. Cultural, Linguistic, And Literary Transitions Of Proverbs And Proverbial Phrases By Vincenzo Brusantino, Pompeo Sarnelli, And John Florio, Daniela D'Eugenio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation demonstrates how literary paremias, i.e. proverbs and proverbial phrases, constitute a rich archive of considerable historical, cultural, and linguistic significance. As discursive phenomena, paremias are usually studied in the context of oral traditions, but this study examines them in terms of what they reveal about the literary works in which they appear. Specifically, it analyzes the context in which they are employed and, through them, it extracts the author’s perspectives, references to and borrowings from previous works, responses to the social and cultural conditions of the time, and effects on the narrative. The exploration of paremias in literary …

Creating An Unbroken Line Of Becoming In Live Music Performance, Bonnie B. Mcalvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation provides an approach to the pedagogy of musical expression in applied music study. Exercises are provided which support a student’s mastery of the mechanics of grouping, and this mastery is put to work in an adaptation of the work of the great Russian acting teacher, Constantine Stanislavski. Mapping of embodiment schema in the manner of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) is asserted as a useful interface between grouped pitch objects and meaning; mappings are utilized by the instrumental music performer in the same manner as Stanislavski taught his acting students to utilize given circumstances. The discourse situates all of …

Exploring The Internal Statistics: Single Image Super-Resolution, Completion And Captioning, Yang Xian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Image enhancement has drawn increasingly attention in improving image quality or interpretability. It aims to modify images to achieve a better perception for human visual system or a more suitable representation for further analysis in a variety of applications such as medical imaging, remote sensing, and video surveillance. Based on different attributes of the given input images, enhancement tasks vary, e.g., noise removal, deblurring, resolution enhancement, prediction of missing pixels, etc. The latter two are usually referred to as image super-resolution and image inpainting (or completion).

Image super-resolution and completion are numerically ill-posed problems. Multi-frame-based approaches make use of the …

Evil And The Ontological Disproof, Carl J. Brownson Iii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a revival of the ontological disproof, an ontological argument against the existence of God. The ontological disproof, in its original form, argues that God is impossible, because if God exists, he must exist necessarily, and necessary existence is impossible. The notion of necessary existence has been largely rehabilitated since this argument was first offered in 1948, and the argument has accordingly lost much of its force. I argue that the ontological disproof ought to be combined with the problem of evil, and that the resulting synthesis of the two arguments is far more powerful than either …

Is It All Relative? Relative Pitch And L2 Lexical Tone Perception/Tone Language Comprehension By Adult Tone And Non-Tone Language Speakers, Sloane C. Von Wertz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Languages generally use musical pitch variation of the voice as part of their sound systems (Maddieson, 2011)—pitch variations that can be somewhat reminiscent of music. Music ability and/or training may influence language processing (e.g., Bidelman et al, 2011; Delogue et al, 2010). In particular, studies have concluded that there may be a relationship between absolute pitch and tone language acquisition (e.g., Lee, Lee, and Shi, 2011; Tillmann et al., 2011; Pfordresher and Brown, 2009). Other research has shown that fundamental frequency (F0) and F0 slope are crucial elements upon which native tone language speakers rely in tone perception (Guion and …

In Search Of Homo Sociologicus, Yunqi Xue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The subject of this dissertation is to build an epistemic logic system that is able to show the spreading of knowledge and beliefs in a social network that contains multiple subgroups. Epistemic logic is the study of logical systems that express mathematical properties of knowledge and belief. In recent years, there have been increasing number of new epistemic logic systems that are focused on community properties such as knowledge and belief adoption among friends.

We are interested in revisable and actionable social knowledge/belief that leads to a large group action. Instead of centralized coordination, bottom-up approach is our focus. We …

Semantic Attention: Effects Of Modality, Lexicality And Semantic Content, David Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the discovery of the Stroop Effect in 1935 questions about the role of language vs. non-lexical stimuli in selective attention remain. Early researchers attributed the powerful distracting influence shown in the Stroop task, naming the color in which a spelled word is printed when incongruent with the color name the word spells, to an automaticity of language that gives it privileged access to meaning, but many others since have shown various ways to reduce or even reverse this distracting effect of an incongruent word. This study addresses this by using EEG to record neural activity along with reaction time …

Pirandello Proto-Modern: A New Reading Of L’Esclusa, Bradford Masoni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Luigi Pirandello’s first novel, L’Esclusa, written in 1893, but not published in its definitive edition until 1927, straddles two literary worlds: that of the realistic style of the Italian veristi, and something new, a style and approach to narrative that anticipates the theory of writing Pirandello lays out in his long essay L’Umorismo, as well as the kinds of experimental writing that one associates with early-20^th-century modernism in general, and with Pirandello’s later work in particular. The novel’s living in both worlds, however, makes it an interesting and problematic text. First, it gives readers insight into …

Thule Iron Use In The Pre-Contact Arctic, Eileen Colligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the use of iron by the Thule people, a Neoeskimo culture that lived in the North American Arctic between approximately 1000 AD and 1400 ̶ 1500 AD. The study takes a pan-Arctic perspective to bring together research that has usually been done on a more-limited geographical scale. This viewpoint shows the Thule culture from a view that corresponds to their world.

The study focuses on: (1) revisions in the accepted chronology of the Thule and how these have affected the explanations for the Thule Migration from Alaska to Greenland; (2) new understandings about the iron that was …

Bodies Of Knowledge: An Anatomy And Kinesiology Of The American Prison Nation, 'Human'-Making, And Twenty-First-Century Techno-Gods, Lyndsey Karr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the ‘Human’.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the “prison nation,” I will show the ‘human’ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and ‘Human’ (Flesh-Body-‘Human’) statuses and subjectivity.

Bringing this ‘Human’ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American “prison nation.” Following Mark Hansen’s treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I …

A Playful Context Enhances Bilingual And Monolingual Preschoolers’ Mastery Motivation And Private Speech, Jeremy Sawyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children’s private speech (audible self-talk) has been studied primarily as a cognitive tool for thinking, planning and self-regulation. This study investigated whether private speech may also function as a tool for motivation. Vygotskian and self-determination theory suggest that children can develop to become agentic and inspired, or conversely disengaged and alienated, based largely on their social conditions of development. Thus, it is important to investigate children’s motivational processes in social and educational contexts that are central to child development. U.S. preschool enrollment is expanding, accompanied by a decline in play-based pedagogy and growth of didactic, teacher-centered approaches. To illuminate the …

Genealogy Of The Concept Of "Hate Crime": The Cultural Implications Of Legal Innovation And Social Change, Roslyn Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The term "hate crime" is new to legislative and public discourse, as well as legal and social science scholarship. A decade after the concept of a "hate crime" was introduced in Congress, the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA), to punish criminal actors who target victims because of their characteristics (race, color ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, gender, gender identity, or disability). Using relevant archival sources, this project uses genealogical qualitative methods to examine the interplay of cultural elements manifested in this provocative term, which reflect dominance and subjugation among social groups (In- and Out-Groups) …

Thinking About The Self While Talking To Someone Else: Investigating Self-Focus In Conversation, Carrie Dimatteo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although research has shown that self-focus brings attention to how one is doing relative to standards and changes behavior to better meet those standards (Carver & Scheier, 1981; Duval & Wicklund, 1972), this process has rarely been tested within conversations. Three experiments tested (1) whether state self-focus, measured by looking at oneself on-screen during online video chats, varied as a function of changing self-standard discrepancies (manipulated by conversation topics) or by traits related to self-focus (self-esteem, social anxiety, and self-consciousness) and (2) how state self-focus, manipulated by the presence or absence of the self on the video chat screen, and/or …

A Sentiment Analysis Of Language & Gender Using Word Embedding Models, Ellyn Rolleston Keith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since Robin Lakoff started the conversation around language and gender with her 1975 essay “Language and Woman’s Place,” extensive work has been done on analyzing sociolinguistics associated with gender. While much work has been done on the differences between how men and women use language, there is less research to be found on language about women as opposed to language about men. In this work, I build a word embedding model from a corpus of Wikipedia film summaries and use this model to create lists of words associated with men and words associated with women. I then use sentiment analysis …

Exhibitions Of Outsider Art Since 1947, Christina Mccollum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The search for a “raw art,” untouched by the corrupting effects of culture, led Jean Dubuffet and others to collect, under the heading Art Brut (Outsider art), art made by the mentally ill and otherwise disenfranchised, poor, uneducated, elderly, and/or physically disabled. Since Dubuffet’s codification of Art Brut around 1945, the Outsider has been identified by cultural isolation, mental distance and a requisite discovery by some cultural insider, paternal or exploitative. This discoverer - whether doctor, artist or collector - becomes a translator of sorts, instructing audiences through exhibitions as to how they should receive this work by marginalized artists. …

Genre, Representation, And Memory In Spanish Civil War Texts By Women From Spain And The United States, Jennifer Prince

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to addresses a lacuna in the androcentric Spanish Civil War literary canon by recovering women’s voices writing about the war from the 1930s to the present. It also examines the war stories women tell and how they represent themselves and others when writing about the Spanish Civil War. All of the seven authors examined here write through the lens of some distance—either as American citizens observing the war or as the descendants of the war’s survivors—but each with an intimate connection rooted in biology or ideology. The foundation of this dissertation is close reading and textual analysis …

Past Peer Victimization Experiences And Current Psychological Well-Being And Ethnic Identity Among South Asian College Students, Rejitha Nair

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Very little is known about the peer victimization experiences of South Asian immigrant students and the factors involved in these experiences. The present study retrospectively investigated the peer victimization experiences of South Asian immigrant students in high school, the perceived reasons for victimization, and how these experiences relate to their psychological well-being and ethnic identity as college students. Two hundred and twenty college students, who were first or second generation immigrants from South Asia (e.g., India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal) and attended high school in the United States, participated in the study.

Overall, the results revealed that …

Albert Camus's Mediterraneanism In La Peste, Jacquelyn Libby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following dissertation uses the speech Camus gave at the inauguration of a new community arts center in Algiers in 1937, entitled “La Culture Indigène. La Nouvelle Culture Méditerranéenne,” to show that this expression of Mediterraneanism, as well as its evolution, can be detected in his novel La Peste, which was published ten years later in 1947. The bearing of Camus’s identification with the Mediterranean world on his speech is that it generated a sense of in-betweenness. This in-betweenness, I argue, is a key feature of Camus’s Mediterranean thought that is also found in La Peste’s subject matter, …

The Lived Experience Of Feeling Disrespected, Nadine Donahue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study is to explore the lived experience of feeling disrespected. The participants were registered professional nurses, with at least two years of clinical experience. A phenomenological approach utilizing Giorgi’s method was used to analyze the data and interpret the findings for this study. New knowledge about feeling disrespected contributes to nursing science and may help nurses and organizations that employ them, provide a healthy work environment that supports and retain them. The experience of feeling disrespected was illuminated by the following themes; “Powerless, feeling like a “nobody,” treated like you are “stupid,” utter discouragement and broken …