Digital Commons Network^™

Negotiating National Identity: A Study Of Nationalist Rhetoric During The British Voluntary Recruiting Movement, 1914-1916, Emily Cloys

Master's Theses

Within weeks of the outbreak of World War I, the British Army faced a critical demand for more soldiers to replenish its casualties and to compete with the mass conscript armies of the Central Powers. Hesitant to break from its tradition of non-conscription, the British government relied on a period of voluntary recruitment from 1914 to 1916, resulting in the enlistment of nearly 2.5 million soldiers.

This thesis examines the period of British voluntary recruitment during World War I by exploring how conceptions of British national identity served as a technique of persuasion and as a catalyst for individual enlistment. …

A Proof Of Concept For Detection Of Palato-Lingual Contact Without Intraoral Electrodes In A Human Participant, Amitava Biswas

Master's Theses

The author of this thesis conceived and investigated an unexpected electrical signal that may not be noticed during regular electroglottography (EGG) when electrodes are conventionally placed on the anterior surface of the throat. It appears that there is a measurable electrical signal from the EGG equipment when electrodes are placed over the frontal cheek (belly of zygomatic muscle), and the tongue is elevated to contact the hard palate, or the tongue is lowered to break the contact. Therefore, this phenomenon is designated as unconventional electroglottography (UEGG, Dr. Steven Cloud, private communication, July 17, 2022).

Two distinctive patterns of waveforms were …

Analysis And Usage Of Natural Language Features In Success Prediction Of Legislative Testimonies, Marine Cossoul

Master's Theses

Committee meetings are a fundamental part of the legislative process in which
constituents, lobbyists, and legislators alike can speak on proposed bills at the
local and state level. Oftentimes, unspoken “rules” or standards are at play in
political processes that can influence the trajectory of a bill, leaving constituents
without a political background at an inherent disadvantage when engaging with
the legislative process. The work done in this thesis aims to explore the extent to
which the language and phraseology of a general public testimony can influence a
vote, and examine how this information can be used to promote civic …

Disability Identity In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Letters, Jackson Fields

Master's Theses

This thesis focuses on letters written by British Romantic author Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote about his chronic illness during the period of emerging modern ideas of disability. Coleridge’s letters are valuable to readers in the twenty-first century because they enable us to track the formation and negotiation of Coleridge’s disability identity. As one of the most important thinkers and authors in the English language, Coleridge has a lot to teach us about how one can understand their illnesses, medical authority, and the influences of disability on friendships and social roles. This thesis considers Coleridge’s letters to his loved ones …

Qualifying Quantifiers: A Usage-Based, Diachronic Analysis Of Quantifier Constructions, Danielle Miles Angier

Master's Theses

Adnominal quantifiers have been a source of contention in existing research, owing to their unique distributional patterns that do not match those of adjectives or determiners. Traditional accounts have typically focused on one aspect of quantifier behavior without looking at the group as a whole, and existing theories are disparate and inconsistent. This study tackles the problem of quantifier variation from a diachronic, usage-based, constructionist perspective. The goal of this paper is to identify patterns of change that can explain the variation exhibited by quantifiers today, focused on whether they are best classified as adjectives, determiners, or both; why every …

Sustainable Roots: The Environmental Genealogies Of Chicanas And Latinas, Marlene Andrade

Master's Theses

Ingenuity and tending to the land are anything but contemporary to Communities of Color (COC). Even when our communities become targets of environmental racism and experience the brunt of institution-based degradation, COC resist in a multitude of ways. While there is a plethora of documented social movements led by the Chicanx community for civil, educational, and labor rights, there is a paucity of Chicanx presence in environmental discourse. Thus, my scholar-activist commitments are to highlight Chicana/Latina herstories, epistemologies, and praxes that debunk the narrow white-heteropatriarchal male narrative in mainstream environmentalism. This dominant narrative fails to: (a) address the historical and …

Thinking Styles, Conspiracist Belief, And The Mediating Role Of The Dunning-Kruger Effect In Modeling Belief Change, Lucas C. Cusano

Master's Theses

Why can a person believe something for which there is no evidence and yet also fail to believe something for which there is overwhelming evidence? This study develops a structural model of belief change using the latent constructs of thinking styles and conspiracist belief while accounting for the Dunning-Kruger effect (i.e., overconfidence in one’s knowledge the less one knows about a topic) as a mediator. A combined two-hundred and twenty-six participants from both Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the introductory psychology SONA subject pool were given two knowledge measures on topics of genetic modification and vaccination before and after reading refutational …

Automatic Presentation Slide Generation Using Llms, Tanya Gupta

Master's Theses

Presentation slides are widely used for conveying information in academic and professional contexts. However, manual slide creation can be time-consuming. Our research focuses on automated slide generation, specifically for scientific research papers. Automating the creation of presentation slides for scientific documents is a rather novel task and hence, there’s limited training data available and there also exists the token constraints of language models like BERT, with a maximum sequence length of 512 tokens. In this study, we fine-tune large language models, including Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (supporting sequences up to 16,834 tokens) and BIGBIRD-Pegasus (supporting sequences up to 4,096 tokens). We tackle this …

The King And His Court: The Culture Of Royal Power And The Creation Of The Angevin Empire Under Henry Ii, Joseph Jarrell

Master's Theses

Legal codes, literature, history, and violence were necessary aspects of royal power that in conjunction with resources gained from familial inheritance and a fortunate marriage allowed King Henry II to build, govern, and legitimize his rule over the Angevin Empire, as well as attempt to create an Angevin dynasty. Examining these subjects advances ideas about medieval royal culture and its relation to political power and legal power in the twelfth century Angevin Empire.

Historiography has long examined this period as the histories of great men, but recent trends have examined the interplay of power, politics, and gender during the Middle …

Teachers’ Perceptions Of Ells By Racial Identity: A Pilot Study, Ha Tran

Master's Theses

ABSTRACTAs racial and political tensions grow within the United States, it is not uncommon for negative teacher perceptions of English Language Learners (ELLs) to be documented in educational research. This observed phenomenon is especially worrisome for three reasons: (1) teachers’ perceptions of their students are known to affect their pedagogy, (2) teacher perception and pedagogy influences student outcomes, and (3) the ELL population continues to be the quickest growing subset within the American public-school student body. While extensive, previous research has not attempted to compare teacher perceptions of ELLs across varying racial identity groups of ELLs. Thus, this pilot study …

Reconstructing Auditory Evoked Cortical Response With Fewer Trials, Zoey Y. Zhang

Master's Theses

Auditory evoked fields (AEF) paradigm is a common research tool to study human auditory responses by using Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a neuroimaging tool. AEF paradigm requires repetition over many trials to achieve adequate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), but Autistic children and some other populations cannot tolerate prolonged exam time due to various reasons. To address these challenges, this project uses a novel machine learning algorithm, Champagne with baseline noise learning, to reconstruct AEF data with fewer trials (80%, 60%, 40%, 20%) but produce the same results as using all AEF trials (100%). The results show that this novel machine learning algorithm can …

Central Americans At A Crossroads: Asylum Seekers’ Testimonios Of Mental Health After Detention And Family Separation, Corie E. Schwabenland Garcia

Master's Theses

Though Central American asylum seekers are presently hypervisible in the U.S. consciousness, this population continues to be inadequately understood or cared for. Discussion of this population often presents them as a helpless and damaged population, in need of saving, fixing, or shelter -- beyond their trauma, they cease to exist. This qualitative study utilizes first-person testimonio methodology to understand the psychological experiences of Central American migrants seeking asylum in the United States, the stressors they face, and the mental health support that can and should be provided to them. Their stories speak to a space of sociopolitical precarity in the …

Switching “Leader” And “Follower” Roles: The Wedding First Dance As A Representation Of A Modern Relationship, Anna Magidson

Master's Theses

The purpose of this exploratory study was to determine whether introducing switch dancing as an alternative to the traditional “leader” and “follower” role dynamic in a wedding first dance could be an effective tool of empowerment for people of all gender identities and sexual orientations. It was particularly important to understand whether this could have a positive impact on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other (LGBTQIA+) community. To the researcher’s knowledge, no other academic research paper has ever examined the intersectionality between the wedding industry, the LGBTQIA+ community, and switch partner dancing. This study was developed …

Predicting Startup Success Using Publicly Available Data, Emily Gavrilenko

Master's Theses

Predicting the success of an early-stage startup has always been a major effort for investors and venture funds. Statistically, there are about 305 million total startups created in a year, but less than 10% of them succeed to become profitable businesses. Accurately identifying the signs of startup growth is the work of countless investors, and in recent years, research has turned to machine learning in hopes of improving the accuracy and speed of startup success prediction.

To learn about a startup, investors have to navigate many different internet sources and often rely on personal intuition to determine the startup’s potential …

How Chicago Public Schools Engaged African American Parents In The Closing Of Austin Career Academy High School, Shani Blackwell

Master's Theses

The role of African American parents in education reform initiatives in Chicago is not clearly defined. Local School Councils (LSC) allow parents to make school related decisions in Chicago. But LSCs are removed from decisions about whether or not to place school on or off probation, and whether or not to close schools based on performance or building utilization. In 2013, African American and Latinx parents expressed outrage over the decision by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to close 49 schools with protests, including a hunger strike by a group of parents, and pleas to the Chicago Board of Education (BOE). …

Connecting School Climate And Trust: A Content Analysis Of Elements Of Trust In Student And Staff School Climate Surveys, Katherine Thyen

Master's Theses

This study aims to make a concrete connection between trust in schools and school climate. Research indicates that both trust and school climate can positively impact school experiences and performance for teachers and students, but no formal connection has been made between these two elements of schools. In order to answer this study’s research questions of “What differences in frequency and context of trust dimensions exist between student surveys and teacher surveys?” and “How are survey items related to trust dispersed across school climate domains?”, a directed qualitative content analysis was performed. School climate surveys administered to students and teachers …

The Role Of Speech-Language Pathologists In Trauma-Informed Practices: Feelings, Attitudes, And Reported Behaviors Of Colorado School Speech-Language Pathologists, Kallie Haritopoulos

Master's Theses

Research indicates that a majority of children in the United States will be exposed to at least one traumatic event before they turn 18, and some children experience multiple forms. Trauma can cause various adverse effects in physical, cognitive, linguistic, behavioral, social, and emotional functioning, which can affect educational performance and success. Despite the increased chance that children who have experience trauma will receive speech and language services, research surrounding trauma-informed practices predominantly focus on the role of general education teachers and mental health professionals. This qualitative study aimed to understand the feelings, attitudes, and reported behaviors of five Colorado …

Alt-Right Of The_Donald And Authoritarian Communists On Reddit: Internet Memes To Build Community, Joshua Hendricks

Master's Theses

This project infuses Lacanian psychoanalysis further into the rhetorical study by exploring authoritarian discourses on Reddit. I analyze the alt-right community that found a home on the subreddit r/The_Donald and chart their discourse as it shaped from the quarantine to the establishment of an independent forum called TheDonald.win. I selected memes and the comments around them to build the analysis. The second aspect of this thesis examines authoritarian communist discourse on Reddit. The leftist community splintered when r/socialism banned a community member because the person made catgirl art. The ban sent shockwaves through the leftist community on Reddit and generated …

Legislative Language For Success, Sanjana Gundala

Master's Theses

Legislative committee meetings are an integral part of the lawmaking process for local and state bills. The testimony presented during these meetings is a large factor in the outcome of the proposed bill. This research uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques to analyze testimonies from California Legislative committee meetings from 2015-2016 in order to identify what aspects of a testimony makes it successful. A testimony is considered successful if the alignment of the testimony matches the bill outcome (alignment is "For" and the bill passes or alignment is "Against" and the bill fails). The process of finding what …

Evaluation Of Automatic Text Summarization Using Synthetic Facts, Jaewook Ahn

Master's Theses

Automatic text summarization has achieved remarkable success with the development of deep neural networks and the availability of standardized benchmark datasets. It can generate fluent, human-like summaries. However, the unreliability of the existing evaluation metrics hinders its practical usage and slows down its progress. To address this issue, we propose an automatic reference-less text summarization evaluation system with dynamically generated synthetic facts. We hypothesize that if a system guarantees a summary that has all the facts that are 100% known in the synthetic document, it can provide natural interpretability and high feasibility in measuring factual consistency and comprehensiveness. To our …

Aac And Multilingualism In Children With Complex Communication Needs: Perspectives Of Filipino Parents And Teaching Professionals, Anne Aubrey V. Dulay

Master's Theses

Parents and teaching professionals of children who use augmentative and/or alternative communication (AAC) systems within multilingual environments often face complicated decisions regarding their language choices and practices. Understanding parents’ and teaching professionals’ perceptions on this topic can assist AAC service providers in supporting them better during intervention. This study aimed to explore the perceptions of Filipino parents and teaching professionals regarding AAC and multilingualism. Specifically, this study sought to describe parents’ and teaching professionals’ language choices and practices when interacting with the AAC communicator and to describe the factors that influence their language choices and practices. This study followed a …

Unmasking Medical Fake News Using Machine Learning Techniques, Garima Chaphekar

Master's Theses

Fake news has always been a critical and challenging problem in the informationenvironment. The propagation of false news is a serious concern, especially in medical information, which can have dangerous and potentially deadly consequences. With the tsunami of online misinformation, it is crucial to fight fake medical news. In this study, we use machine learning techniques to help detect fake news related to diseases, including COVID-19, Ebola, Zika, SARS, Cancer, and Polio. To facilitate research in this space, we create a new medical dataset named MedHub. MedHub has records from two publicly available datasets on COVID and manually curated facts …

Smartrec - A Smart Conversational Recommendation System Using Semantic Knowledge Graphs, Sudha Vijayakumar

Master's Theses

CRS strives to return the most relevant recommendations to users through a multi-turn interactive conversation. The Covid-19 pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated the pace of adoption of conversational AI systems by many online platforms needing to provide highly available customer support. This ongoing demand calls for the need to implement more generic and efficient conversational agents and recommendation engines that can provide customers with the required information at every stage of the user’s interaction with the e-commerce platform. This study presents a Smart Conversational AI-based recommendation system - SMARTREC, which enables a multi-turn conversation with the user to understand the context …

Reproductive Health In Rural Guatemala: Finding A Medium Between State And Ngo Policies, Zayra Rivera

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study is to understand and evaluate the manner in which the NGO sector surpasses state led efforts related to improving knowledge about reproductive health within rural areas in Guatemala. This research focuses on using methodologies from four Adolescent Youth Health Programs within the region of Lake Atitlan as well as state run institutions such as schools and health centers.

More specifically, this case study seeks to analyze the current gaps sexual and reproductive health programming in rural indigenous towns in the Sololá department of Guatemala. It compares four private NGO institutions with two public organizations, specifically …

Knowledge And Perceptions Of Slp Graduate Students Regarding Multiculturalism, Evy Jewell Hayes

Master's Theses

Populations in the United States rise daily, as do the number of people who are considered multicultural. With this comes a greater need for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who are able to assess and treat such individuals – a training process that begins in graduate programs. The primary objective of this study was to determine the knowledge and perceptions of graduate students in speech-language pathology as it pertains to multiculturalism. A survey was conducted to explore graduate students’ knowledge and perceptions of multicultural topics. Participants were recruited from programs in the southeastern United States via email. Just under 400 surveys were …

Examining The Association Between Fictive Kin Care, Parental Attachment And Emotional Distress In College Students, Roxanne Watts

Master's Theses

Having a supportive and secure relationship with parents can predict less emotional distress in college students. In addition to parental support, many families leverage fictive kin caregivers to provide support. This is especially true in communities of racial and ethnic minorities. The present study investigated the association between fictive kin care, parental relationships, and emotional distress in college students. One hundred fourteen (N = 114) college students completed measures that assessed parental and fictive-kin relationships, social support, and emotional distress. A COVID-19 pandemic-related distress measure was also administered. Three hypotheses were tested. First, it was hypothesized that fictive kin …

Using Deep Learning And Uav Imagery To Detect Elkhorn Coral In St. Croix’S East End Marine Park, Samuel Wyatt

Master's Theses

Elkhorn coral, or Acropora palmata, is an important reef building species that promotes species abundance and other ecological services to the communities in the US Virgin Islands. We captured high resolution imagery of a reef in St. Croix’s East End Marine Park using a Wingtra One UAV. We then used deep learning techniques to detect individual coral colonies. We compared two deep learning models, FasterRCNN and MaskRCNN, and found that the models achieved accuracy shores up to 0.78. These scores improved when examining only larger corals in shallow waters. The model was able to both detect Elkhorn coral and …

Amplifying Testimonios Of Latino Male Student Success, Jilian Gómez

Master's Theses

The purpose of this qualitative counternarrative ethnographic study was to explore the success stories and lived experiences of six Latino male students, utilizing an asset-based approach and consideration of intersectional identity, cultural wealth, and contextual settings. This asset-based theoretical framework, the Latino Male Student Success Paradigm, was developed and used to contextualize the Latino male students' testimonios of their experiences and how they advanced their academic success. A semi-structured interview protocol was used to invite testimonios from the research participants, which included discussions about their academic success. The testimonios provided insight into what facilitated their resiliency when facing adversity within …

Influences Of Latino Caregivers’ Input And Acculturation On Children’S Bilingual Development: A Speech Sample Analysis, Jordan Sierra Perry

Master's Theses

Interactions with caregivers are important for children’s development. In particular, the language input that young dual language learners (DLLs) receive from their primary caregivers affects their cultural knowledge and their bilingual language outcomes. However, relatively little research has been conducted to investigate the cultural contexts that influence Latino caregivers’ bilingual language use at home, including their acculturation level. Thus, the present study examined the relation between caregivers’ acculturation and their children’s bilingual (Spanish and English) language use, and whether this relation varied as a function of caregivers’ bilingual language use. Parent-report measures of bilingual language use, in addition to video …

“It Made Me Question If I Was In The Right Hands”: Exploring Cancer Prognostic Conversations Between Providers And Latinx Patients, Yesenia Anabel Carrillo

Master's Theses

People of color are often confronted by barriers within the health-care system that white people are not likely to encounter. Latinx patients are among those who experience racial health disparities, typically due to the lack of health literacy support and limited resource access. Drawing on previous work that focuses on exploring patient, provider, and caregiver preferences for cancer prognostic conversations; this study explores perceptions of cancer prognostic conversations between providers and Latinx patients to better understand the degree of cultural competence among providers and opportunities for enhancing interpersonal communication with Latinx patients. Interviews with seven patients and five providers were …