Digital Commons Network^™

Interior Mountains & Distant Clouds, Ping Zheng

Masters Theses

Painting allows infinite scope for imaginative freedom beyond the ambiguity of the inner landscape. Painting connects the natural world outside to the inner natural world, allowing me to exist in the present while also reconciling childhood meanings. It brings me alive, allowing me to find a new identity. No longer trapped within the repressive structures of family, rigid schooling, and culture, the language of sky, land, mountain, and water become living metaphors of limitless possibilities with forms and color. My paintings are abstract, but they also present me as a character, independent and emerging from the environment. The work explores …

Verb Things: Changing The Conversation, Kendra Kirchmer

Masters Theses

The way we communicate has a direct impact on our impressions of the world this thesis argues that the various forms of abstraction represented by language and the focus on objectivity in development of explicit knowledge have created the impression that the world of inanimate things is a static one. Through both text and furniture objects, this thesis proposes a metaphoric re-languaging of the way we understand our objects, from nouns to verbs as a means to enhance our interactions with them and through them with ourselves and others.

Traversing Languagescapes, Desmond Pang

Masters Theses

To maneuver is to design. As a multilingual graphic designer, I maneuver across different languages and their respective scripts. My work invites my audience to take a leap with me into unknown languagescapes.

Through sampling, analyzing similarities and differences, switching applications and contexts, challenging functions, inserting and overlaying recognizable visual systems as well as combining disparate language scripts, I become a guide for my audience, assisting them, regardless of mother tongue, to attain a degree of understanding when faced with an unfamiliar language.

My thesis asserts the critical role graphic designers play in demystifying and cracking language barriers. Every graphic …

Live Edges: All Possible Adjacencies, Rebecca Leffell Koren

Masters Theses

Edge is a deceptive word. It suggests lines, borders, designations—a kind of certainty. I see edge instead as a porous adjacency—the noise at the intersection of planes that adds meaning, rather than separation. Live Edges is a design research practice that is hyperobservational and multi-planar. Equal parts training ground and methodology, what began as an effort to derive graphic form from the intangible qualities of place developed into an approach to parsing complexity.

Setting locality as my origin point, signifiers of place—materiality, behavior, orientation, architectural form—serve as catalysts for graphic response. I interpret landscape in order to construct my own, …

Hyphen Nation: A Reconciliation, Lynn Amhaz

Masters Theses

As a transnational living between Beirut, Lebanon, and Providence, Rhode Island, in the United States, I use my design practice to negotiate, reconcile and inform a cultural identity defined through an equation of two different nations. I am open to what comes from this reality between. Linguistically, a hyphen simultaneously binds and divides a compound term. As a designer, I view the hyphen as a shifting axis for telling stories. In the process, I approach the hyphen as an indeterminate zone — a productive site for authoring systems and suggesting narratives linking two nations — their cultures, languages, times and …

Hybrid Spaces In The City, Zhihao Li

Masters Theses

This investigation is about the edge, hybrid space, and public engagement in the urban environment in Washington, DC. There are three phases of this research. In Phase 1, the investigation focuses on clarifying the definitions of terms such as edge, transition, vegetated, and constructed spaces. In Phase 2, the study explores methods of understanding urban fabric based on the experiential and physical analysis. In Phase 3, the investigation generates critiques of the site conditions between Union Station and Union Square in Washington, DC.

The film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William Whyte, which shows people’s different behaviors …

Context Clues, Brynn Trusewicz

Masters Theses

Context Clues explores the tensions between identity and appearance, especially as it relates to queer identities and the bodies that carry them.

It assumes that identity and appearance aren’t always straight forward or line up in expected ways.

It aims to expose our discomfort about this uncertainty.

It explores how we look at and evaluate others; what we observe and what we fill in.

It compares how we look at others and how we look to others.

It critiques the absurdity of how people perceive and interact with each other, by putting them in uncomfortable scenarios and exaggerating awkward situations. …

Interplayable Surface: An Exploration On Augmented Gui That Co-Exists With Physical Environments, Hoon Yoon

Masters Theses

The main goal of this experiment-driven thesis is to envision and design an interactive GUI1(graphic user interface) that coexists with physical surfaces. Based on an understanding of user behavioral patterns for getting access to information in these types of situations, experimentations and prototypes are implemented and tested with participants. In particular, to observe the user behavioral pattern for augmented GUI within certain environments and circumstances, this thesis presents several types of participatory experimentations with physical GUIs. The experiment participants were encouraged to participate in re-creates and reorganizes physical GUI, relating to their own situational specificity or informational tendencies they have. …

Practice Makes Practice, Gabriel Melcher

Masters Theses

Graphic Designers today must operate independently of specific tools and media. Modes of production are democratized, and so it is in the ways we choose to operate within these modes that define the value of the field. Practice Makes Practice is a response to this condition, refocusing attention from the products of design as endpoints of process to visual evidence of persistent questioning by the designer.

Through my work I question roles and media, enfolding audience, client, and collaborators into my process. My practice is improvisational, quick, and performative in its response to the specifics of site and circumstance. Through …

Casting Forward: Proactivist Studies In Projection, Lisa J. Maione

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Cinematic Transmedia: A Physiological Look At Engagement With Marvel's Cinematic Universe As Measured By Brainwaves And Electrodermal Activity, Tabitha Cassidy

Masters Theses

This study looks at engagement levels within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) at physiological and neurological levels, and with self-reported measures. One show or movie in each of three categories of Marvel media (a movie, television show, and streaming show) were shown to participants who then had their brainwaves and galvanic skin response recorded to determine whether or not they were engaged with the transmedia aspects of the MCU. Results showed that participants were consistently engaged with the transmedia throughout all three media types, with brainwaves varying only slightly between each content. The Marvel movie, “The Avengers” was most engaging …

Fandom And Social Media Marketing: Looking At Doctor Who Tumblr Engagement Through The Lens Of Participatory Culture, Elizabeth Demeo

Masters Theses

In social media marketing, the most important aspect that brands and companies try to reach for is engagement with their audience. Today’s audience is no longer filled with passive consumers, but active participants. Nowhere is this more obvious than with fans of entertainment television. When television fans go on social media, they look to actively discuss, share content, and engage with other fans of the show. In the realm of entertainment television and social media marketing, the Doctor Who Tumblr has both a strong presence and an engaged audience. In 2013, the Tumblr page won a Shorty Award for its …

Hit After Hit: Examining The Image Repair Strategies Of Johnny Manziel, Lisa Deruiter

Masters Theses

Over the past decades, the landscape of sports journalism has changed to where now, athletes are often in the news just as frequently for their positive on-the-field play as they are for their negative off-the-field issues. Following these issues, the athletes must find strategies to employ to fix their damaged reputations. This thesis includes a rhetorical analysis of the image repair strategies employed by Johnny Manziel after each of his countless reputation-damaging incidents. The paper examines each of Manziel’s problems in depth, gives an overview of his biography, and includes a thorough review of literature regarding Benoit’s Image Repair Theory …

The Ebola Crisis: A Communicative Response From Samaritan's Purse, Bailie Porter

Masters Theses

Crisis does not discriminate. It can strike without warning, at any time or place. Managers, organizations, and leaders alike, must be ready at all times to respond to them, whether they are planned for or not. An efficient and quick response is especially necessary when health crises or natural disasters strike, because human life may be at stake. Crisis communication has become more and more important in a world that is daily filled with catastrophes. This study uses W. Timothy Coomb’s situational crisis communication theory as a lens to view the Ebola crisis. The purpose of the research is to …

Adapting Nonverbal Coding Theory To Mobile Mediated Communication: An Analysis Of Emoji And Other Digital Nonverbals, Carley Durante

Masters Theses

Nonverbal communication has been an area of communication theory studied for decades. Despite more daily communication occurring over mediated communication, there is a lack of research surrounding digital communication, specifically mobile-mediated communication (MMC). While there has been research conducted regarding computer-mediated communication (CMC), specifically studies examining email communication and instant messaging (IM), the mobile conversation is relatively untouched by current scholarship. This paper will streamline nonverbal coding research to set the groundwork for application and translation of nonverbal coding elements to mobile-mediated communication and the text message conversation. Even more specifically, the elements of kinesics, vocalics, and chronemics will be …

Flannery O'Connor And The Poetics Of Prayer: The Analysis Of A Prayer Journal, Emily Wilson

Masters Theses

Prior to the recent discovery of her college prayer journal, kept between 1946 and 1947, knowledge of Flannery O’Connor’s religious influence and activity had been restricted to her letters and published works, such as Mystery and Manners and The Habit of Being. Works such as these shed light onto O’Connor’s background and religious views, making her Catholic faith obvious and explicit. This prayer journal exposes a new aspect of her faith – that is the personal relationship between herself and God shown through narrative. Her prayer journal makes it clear that her external expression of faith, showcased in most of …

Form, Content, And Form As Content, Bon Hae Koo

Masters Theses

Form, Content, and Form as Content demonstrates form as a tool of communication used to explore the role of aesthetics, play, and order in giving form to design. This thesis maps the journey of an aesthetic critic who makes visible and explicit the structures and symbolic meaning valued in the graphic forms we experience.

The practice draws upon the properties of the kaleidoscope, rearranging form to produce new content that questions the reliability of standards, from corporate ranking to color palette trending. Bearing witness to culture, I closely observe and highlight identities and trends that command high stakes in culture. …

Intertwined Pluralities: Designing In The Third Space, Sarah Mohammaddi

Masters Theses

I designed my thesis book to reflect the inquiry at hand—a non-linear, fragmented narrative that can be observed in multiple perspectives. I welcome viewers to read in a traditional manner, following the Contents page as displayed, or engage in a new read of the material by navigating the book using the Live Index.

Yellow pages on the left side display a collection of running quotes from Homi Bhabha's most recent lecture, Translation and Displacement where he spoke of the role of the translator within a multi-centered culture. These quotes can be read in sequential order or in relationship to the …

A Case For Monistic Idealism: Connecting Idealistic Thoughts From Leibniz To Kant With Support In Quantum Physics, Erik Haynes

Masters Theses

Through the analysis of idealistic arguments and evidence from physics, it will be demonstrated that monistic idealism has a great deal of explanatory power as a metaphysical system for the reality that one experiences. Some of the arguments that support this claim include the inadequateness of Cartesian matter, the seemingly infinite divisibility of atoms, matter being reducible to sensations, the unnecessary aspect of matter, and simplicity. Evidence from quantum physics includes such factors as the necessary role of an observer in the collapse of a quantum wave function and the element of nonlocality. Psychological experiments including nonlocal communication, the power …

A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Feminist And Patriarchal Themes Within Shonda Rhimes' Television Shows "Grey's Anatomy," "Scandal," And "How To Get Away With Murder", Katelyn Roshetko

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Ethics With Regard To Compensation And Current Ncaa Policy, Tyler Mcbride

Masters Theses

The purpose of this research is to analyze former NCAA Division I football players’ ethical perceptions of current NCAA policy, specifically concerning regulations governing compensation of the student athlete. This quantitative research study collected data using a 20-question survey instrument composed of demographic and Likert type questions. Statistical analysis determined the data failed to establish a statistically significant behavioral trend arguing either for or against current policies. However, data revealed a statistical difference between the opinions expressed by Caucasian alumni as compared to those of other ethnicities. The purpose of this study was to expose illegitimate processes within the NCAA …

The Rhetorical Fantasies Of The Kent State Rioters: A Study Of Sds Peripheral Influence, Amanda Stanley

Masters Theses

In the 1960s and early 1970s, American colleges were shaken by a group whose collective view of the country was so abhorrent that they tried, through word and action, to tear the country apart. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) created and sustained a vision that was shared by thousands and fueled by stories of members who traveled the country recruiting college students to carry out the organization’s mission of war against society. The words spoken in speeches and written in publications created by the SDS demonstrate the power in a shared vision and served to create unity among …

Smartphones And Cognition: The Case For An Updated Theory Of Electronic Eloquence, Omar Adams

Masters Theses

As Marshall McLuhan first proposed, humanity has progressed through several stages of communication technology that have each fundamentally changed the way people think and behave within society at large. Electronic media redefined society in the 20th century, and now we stand at the cusp of a new revolution. This paper examines the changes brought about by the Internet and new media, with a particular focus on the effects of smartphone and social media use, through the lens of Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s theory of electronic eloquence. An anonymous survey was conducted to determine participants’ preferences on different forms of media as …

Music-Play And Communication In Children With Autism And Their Families: An Ethnographic Study, Melanie Makovsky

Masters Theses

This is an ethnographic research study regarding the nature of commun-, ication, musical behavior, emotional expression, and social relationships in children with autism. Four children completed the study by participating in at least three private music-play sessions attended by the child, his or her mother, and the researcher. All music-play sessions were person-centered and child-led. A local public elementary school hosted the music-play sessions in the music classroom after school hours. In addition, the school supplied all the musical instruments used in the study. The researcher utilized the SCERTS Model assessment tool to examine each child’s abilities in socio-musical communication …

Branding Faith: Do Christian Ministries Reach Millennials With Branding?, Bolashade Hanson

Masters Theses

The purpose of this research study is to discover what branding techniques used by Christian organizations are effective in connecting with Millennials and why, and to determine what are effective branding practices in a religious context. A convergent parallel mixed–method research design was used to gather the data. It included a content analysis of the branding components of four Christian organizations that target Millennials—The Passion Conference, The VOUS Conference, Acquire the Fire and Winterfest. A survey of 150 Millennials of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds within the age range of 18-34 was conducted to collect quantitative data on Millennials’ predispositions …

Defining Afghan Women Characters As Modern Archetypes Using Khaled Hosseini’S A Thousand Splendid Suns And Asne Seierstad’S The Bookseller Of Kabul, Alexandra Andrews

Masters Theses

Middle-Eastern women, specifically Afghan women, are often misunderstood. Yet, authors Khaled Hosseini and Asne Seierstad use the method of storytelling to show that Afghan female characters are not completely subjugated, voiceless, and powerless—despite how they are often depicted in media. Instead, in Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, Afghan female characters are represented as assertive, risk takers, and heroic. By applying Joseph Campbell’s theory regarding the archetypal heroine to the lives of Mariam and Laila from A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Sharifa and Leila from The Bookseller of Kabul, it is clear that these Afghan …

Position The Brand: Identify The Role Of Social Media For Public Accounting Firms In Digital Age, Linbo Yao

Masters Theses

Due to the popularity of social media, accounting industry gradually adapts to using social media for their social benefits and social business. Various social media platforms provide new approach for accounting companies to get involved in this modern digital age. The present study is intended to investigate the roles of social media in public accounting firms in modern digital age by comparing three largest public accounting firms’ social media usages in Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Facebook is community-based network that allows people to connect and make friends with each other. Twitter is a micro blogging network that delivers short and …

All Lives Matter: Media Agenda, Brittany Minard

Masters Theses

This thesis proposal addresses the role that the media play in influencing public opinion with specific attention paid to CNN and Fox News in the way that they covered the shooting of Mike Brown by officer Darren Wilson in August 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. The research has been divided into several sections starting with an introduction which includes, a statement of the problem being addressed, the significance and purpose of this study, and a section about myself as the researcher. This is followed by a literature review which consists of explaining the Agenda Setting Theory to examine how the media …

“First-Rate Eddication”: The Educational Roles Of Merlyn And Dumbledore, Carissa Johnson

Masters Theses

The Once and Future King (1957) and the Harry Potter series (1997-2007) are Bildungsroman stories of young, orphaned boys, Wart and Harry, who endure extraordinary circumstances and become wise, mature, and heroic. The transformation that they undergo is the effect of strong education from their teachers, the wizards Merlyn and Dumbledore. This thesis uses progressive educational theory to demonstrate the model these wizards employ. This study also utilizes a study of discourse grammar and Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development to discuss the nature of Wart’s and Harry’s education. Because of the moral education demonstrated in the stories, reading them …

The Analysis Of The Social Media Among The Youth In The Catholic Diocese Of Moshi And The Implications For Youth Faith Sharing, Faustine Tarimo

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine evangelization in the Catholic Diocese of Moshi in the advent of social media in the 21st century. It investigates the use of social media among youth to find out what social media young people are using and how they are using it to share their faith. It explores the question of whether the use of social media among youth helps them actively in the use in their faith. A survey of 220 youth was conducted across four Vicariates of the Catholic Diocese of Moshi. The results show themajority of the sampled population …