Digital Commons Network^™

The Perception Of Advertising Disclosures From Social Media Influencers And Its Impact On Consumers, Maria Lindquist

Masters Theses

Social media influencers play a commercial role on social media platforms such as Instagram, where sponsored content is often integrated into personal and relatable content. Content which could be considered a “normal” post by social media influencers. Sponsorship disclosures are required and regulated by the Federal Trade Commission to signal paid advertising and partnerships between Influencers and brands. Sponsorship disclosures are theorized to activate persuasion knowledge and psychological reactance, potentially reducing consumer purchase intentions. This study examined how varying levels of sponsorship disclosure affect purchase intentions, perceived authenticity, and psychological reactance among young adult social media users. Sourcing information from …

The Effect Of Perceived Support On Black College Students' Sense Of Belonging, Jamillia Domani Mckinley

Masters Theses

Black college students oftentimes navigate higher education environments while managing academic demands alongside racialized stressor that can weaken their sense of belonging. Existing literature and research examined peer relationships, faculty support, and institutional support separately; however, little to no studies considered how these forms of support operate together in shaping belonging. The current study addressed that gap by examining whether perceived peer support, teacher support, and institutional support predict Black students’ sense of belonging in college and university settings. Through the lens of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, belonging was viewed as a foundational need for confidence, connection, growth, and self …

Linking Greenhouse Gas Fluxes And Plant Responses To Saltwater Intrusion Events Using Remote Sensing, Madeline Jean Moore

Masters Theses

As sea level rise and coastal subsidence increase coastal Louisiana's vulnerability to saltwater intrusion (SWI) events, accurate and rapid monitoring of vegetation responses to these events is becoming increasingly important. In this study, we utilized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) multispectral imagery to assess short-term vegetation responses to simulated SWI events in the Visser’s Experimental Wetland Complex in Saint Martinville, Louisiana. Vegetation patches of two common freshwater wetland species, Panicum hemitomon (Maidencane) and Typha domingensis (Southern Cattail), were exposed to 5 ppt salinity for 6-, 10-, and 17-day durations. Multispectral imagery of both species was collected before and after each SWI …

Mitigating Surfactant-Gas Interactions In Associated Gas Reservoirs: A Simulation And Machine Learning Guided Approach, Francis Dela Nuetor

Masters Theses

Surfactant flooding is a promising chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method for mobilizing residual oil through interfacial tension reduction and wettability alteration. However, its performance in associated-gas reservoirs can be limited by salinity, gas composition, surfactant adsorption, and possible chemical instability. This study investigates the effect of salinity on surfactant flooding efficiency using an integrated reservoir simulation and machine learning workflow. A synthetic three-dimensional reservoir model was developed in ECLIPSE using a 10 × 10 × 3 Cartesian grid to simulate surfactant flooding over a 300-day production period under salinity conditions ranging from 100 to 50,000 ppm. Key outputs, including …

Classifying Storm Surges Along Louisiana Coast Using Machine Learning, Faith Ewere Okunbor

Masters Theses

Storm surges are among the most significant threats to coastal wetlands, causing flooding and saltwater intrusion that alter hydrology, vegetation structure, and long-term ecosystem resilience. Along the Louisiana coast, storm surge effects vary depending on storm behavior, shoreline geometry, and marsh hydrologic connectivity, yet are commonly characterized using broad storm metrics rather than site-specific environmental responses. This study develops a data-driven framework to classify storm surges across coastal Louisiana wetlands using observations from the Coastwide Reference Monitoring System (CRMS). Hourly water-level and salinity time series from twelve hurricanes (2007-2024) were analyzed using a 40-day storm-centered window. Hydrologic and salinity metrics …

Optimizing Co₂ Wag Flooding Parameters For Enhanced Oil Recovery And Formation Damage Control In Asphaltene Reservoirs Using Soft Experimentation, Derrick Amoah Oladele

Masters Theses

CO₂ Water Alternating Gas flooding has become an important enhanced oil recovery process in increasing oil production in medium to heavy oil reservoirs. However, CO₂ injections have the potential to cause asphaltene destabilization, leading to precipitation, deposition, and pore plugging. This study evaluated and optimized the effect of CO₂ flooding parameters to maximize oil recovery and minimized formation damage. Eclipse 300 compositional reservoir simulator was used to assess the effect of CO₂ Water Alternating Gas (WAG) Injection Rate, WAG Ratio, and CO₂ Water Alternating Gas (WAG) Injection Pressure on the reservoir. Predictive models for Cumulative Oil Production (FOPT) and Asphaltene …

Regioselective Tellurination Reactions And Their Utilities, Itunu Comfort Olanrewaju

Masters Theses

This thesis provides a comprehensive study of regioselective tellurination and its applications by integrating experimental and computational techniques, with an aim of synthesizing libraries of organotellurium heterocycles. This study addresses existing challenges in regioselective tellurination, such as unpredictable regioselectivity and avoidance of toxic reagents by harnessing intramolecular Te…O coordination and electrophilic aromatic tellurination. This strategy enables the development of previously poorly accessible compounds including benzotellurazinones, 2-acylaminobenzotellurazoles, and previously unknown 2,3-dihydrobenzo [b] oxatelluranes, which were prepared by antiMarkovnikov anti-addition of TeCl4 to C-C triple bonds. Experimental studies were complemented by computational DFT analyses to provide mechanistic and energetic insight into the …

The Impact Of Teacher Communication Practices On Student Performance In Literacy And Terminology At Geo Prep Next Generation High School, Erica Lafayette

Masters Theses

This study examined the impact of teacher communication clarity on student engagement and vocabulary confidence in a charter high school setting. Grounded in Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory and constructivist perspectives, the research highlights the importance of clear instructional communication in supporting student learning. A quantitative, correlational design was used to analyze data collected from 229 students at GEO Next Generation High School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with 215 valid responses included in the final analysis. Data were gathered through a Likert-scale survey measuring teacher communication clarity, student engagement, and vocabulary confidence. The results revealed moderate, positive, and statistically significant relationships between …

Distilled Intelligence At The Edge: An Iot-Driven Deep Learning Architecture For Plant Health Assessment, Malek Garrach

Masters Theses

This project addresses the challenge of image classification for specific plants in indoor farming environments. With a limited dataset, selecting an efficient and cost-effective model becomes crucial.

The traditional approach of using cloud services for model storage and image processing is not only expensive but also inefficient for this use case, especially when considering the continuous flow of data generated by cameras in indoor farming settings. Cloud-based solutions incur high operational costs, which is not ideal for resource-constrained environments. To overcome these limitations and provide a more economical alternative, we propose the use of IoT devices, specifically Raspberry Pi units, …

Ai-Aided Instructional Framework For Multilingual Learners (Aim-Framework), Boulbaba Abdeljaouad

Masters Theses

This thesis presents EduAtlas, a human-centered AI system that integrates a mobile lesson planning application with wearable smart glasses to support teachers in multilingual classroom environments. The system enables teachers to generate structured lesson plans with multilingual scaffolds and receive real-time instructional support during classroom sessions through a wearable interface. Unlike autonomous systems, EduAtlas is designed to operate collaboratively with teachers, who retain control over all AI-generated suggestions.

The lesson planning component uses large language models and multimodal generation to produce standards-aligned lesson plans, visual aids, and multilingual supports. The wearable component utilizes teacher-triggered audio capture to analyze classroom interactions …

Wake-On-Anomaly Federated Architecture For Privacy-Preserving Poultry Health Early Warning, Mahmoud Aziz Louati

Masters Theses

Highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks, respiratory disease, heat stress, and silent equipment failures share one operational reality: they are detected too late because today’s poultry-health workflow is reactive, manual, and dependent on producers volunteering commercially sensitive data. This thesis presents a wake-on-anomaly federated architecture that addresses both the detection-latency problem and the privacy–adoption deadlock that has so far prevented cross-farm collaboration. The architecture is organized in two tiers. Tier 1 is a lightweight LSTM autoencoder that continuously screens four routine telemetry channels (water, feed, house temperature, activity proxy) and emits a per-window reconstruction-error score. A debounced k-of-m trigger with cooldown …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Recombobulation- Taking The Bad With The Good, Gregory T. Kmieciak

Masters Theses

Recombobulation, a play on the word discombobulated (completely disoriented and utterly confused), is intended as a joke.  In the lore of the Milwaukee airport, the Recombobulation Area is located between the TSA check point and the boarding area, or likewise right after you land and before you are heading out of the airport. It's an area to regroup, get your bearings, or if you're anything like me, have a beer.

I've chosen this made-up word as a thesis title, both for its informal tone and to pay homage to my home town. It offers an air of lightness to otherwise …

The Frame You're Holding, Andrea Mato

Masters Theses

The Frame You're Holding explores how my photographer's eye transitioned into a graphic designer's voice. The projects presented explore how to weave the textural and subjective qualities of photography into a design context. My practice explores how the frames of graphic design – the page of a book, the browser window, or the wall of an exhibition – can be expanded or reimagined. As a designer, I became the translator of content into form, seeking to author the design while collaborating with other voices. The Frame You're Holding is a snapshot of my practice as a graphic designer, encapsulating my …

Returning To The Hand, Tatum Dodd

Masters Theses

Historical preservation is traditionally understood as the act of protecting objects and buildings from change, reinstating and stabilizing the past so they may endure into the future. When preservation seeks to freeze and resolve the past, it separates it from the reality of our multi-layered histories and the traces of labor, repair, and care unfolding across generations. Through a human-centered lens that allows one to touch, uncover, and redefine, we are able to relate to our built environments through an ethical practice of care, inviting new avenues of dialogue and engagement with our past.

Recording traces of the hand within …

Without Traditional Craftsmanship, Modern Design Is Nothing, Muhammad Asif

Masters Theses

This project explores the fusion of traditional wood carving techniques with modern design principles, resulting in a unique Ocean of Design that showcases the beauty of cultural heritage. Inspired by the intricate carvings of my ancestors, who contributed to iconic landmarks like the Omer Hayat palace, I have created a pieces that not only highlights the craftsmanship of my artisans but also reflects my own journey as a designer. The Ocean of Design is influenced by the shapes of leaves and the clean lines of modern aesthetics, blending functionality with artistic expression. Through this project, I aim to promote my …

Numb., Anna Rapson

Masters Theses

Social media platforms, from their conception, posed a break in the lived experience of the average human being’s day to day routines. Although access to information has always been shaped by portals into other lived realities—through photojournalism, print legacy media, news broadcasts both on radio and television—social media has posited a novel phenomenological architecture where borders between embodied reality and perception of lived experience are simultaneously blurred and reinforced. This morphed duality of consciousness positions the body and mind in tension, deconstructing pre-social media conceptions of the ontology of lived experience. In a digital world shaped by limitless input by …

Foveate, Dahlia Aggarwal

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how textiles can unsettle visual assumptions, encouraging a perceptual shift. Through weaving, upholstery, and spatial installation, the work stages a tension between what a surface appears to be and how it is encountered by the body. Through woven pattern, tactile texture, and trompe l’oeil textile surfaces, perception is something negotiated rather than fixed: the eye anticipates one reality while the hand discovers another.

Drawing on a range of sensations gathered from observing landscape formations and textures, it translates enduring scale and material qualities into an interior landscape of woven surfaces and textile-based furniture. Rather than serving as …

Echándole Ganas: Pláticas Of Belonging + Resistance In Art + Design, Itzanya Bravo

Masters Theses

This thesis centers the experiences of Mexican American students, alumni, faculty, and community-based artists navigating art and design higher education in the United States. Grounded in the question ¿Dónde está la gente latina?—where are the Latino people?—this research examines how representation and culturally sustaining practices shape Mexican American students' sense of belonging and creative agency in a country with systems built on white supremacy

Using pláticas as the primary methodology—a relational, conversational approach rooted in community and storytelling traditions—alongside autohistoria-teoría and Chicana Feminist Epistemology, this study draws on eight in-depth pláticas with Mexican American creatives across art + design higher …

What Teachers See: Collaborative Artmaking In Chinese And U.S. Elementary Schools, Jiayu Shi

Masters Theses

This study explores how elementary art teachers in the United States and China perceive and use collaborative artmaking with their students. Driven by my personal journey as a Chinese student and art educator now studying in the U.S., this research asks: How do teachers in these two countries compare in their views of collaborative artmaking, including its social-emotional outcomes, benefits, and challenges. I conducted semi structured interviews with three elementary art teachers: two from China (one veteran, one early-career) and one from the U.S. with experience in both rural and urban schools. Findings show that teachers in both contexts value …

A Thesis By An Art Student Trying To Find Meaning In Simulation Games, Yichuan Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis explores a strange question: what happens if meaning is no longer written by an author, but emerges from the behavior of a system itself?

Beginning with observations of the Providence River and inspired by Conway’s Game of Life, information theory, and artificial life research, the project investigates simulation as a space where language, memory, and collective meaning can evolve without central control. Rather than treating video games as vehicles for storytelling, this research approaches them as dynamic systems capable of generating unpredictable forms of organization and perception.

The thesis proposes a closed spherical computational world populated by simple …

A Body Stitched In Traces, Youyun Shang

Masters Theses

.

Body In Process: Assembly, Control And The Medical Gaze, Fangzhou Lu

Masters Theses

This project begins with the doll as a way to think through assemblage. It has a human form, but it is not born as a whole; it is assembled from parts. Its joints, holes, and modular structure make it more like a puzzle toy. I use it to examine the act of “assembly” itself, and to understand the body as something that can be taken apart, adjusted, and replaced.

This logic of assembly also runs through real-life practices surrounding living bodies. Medical repair and treatment, through suturing, fixation, replacement, and transplantation, maintain and extend the body’s reconfigurability. In the plant …

Until The Ground Breaks, Annie Hu

Masters Theses

Until the Ground Breaks explores the complex relationship between personal memory, embodied experience, and internalized "archival logic." By examining long-term cross-cultural diasporic experiences and the shifting dynamics of family narratives—including the sensory experiences and fading memory of a grandmother, a father's correspondence that acts as a textual record of emotional logic, and the continuous revision of family history—this thesis dissects the psychological tremors that occur when the illusion of a singular, stable memory archive collapses. This research rejects the view of memory as a static container of truth, revealing it instead as a dynamic, unstable, and constantly rewritten living system. …

Held In Sediment, Kati Lowe

Masters Theses

This thesis examines time as a durational, non-linear condition shaped through emotion and perception rather than a sequence of forward-moving events. Through painting and related material strategies, the work focuses on aftermath, residue, interruption, and return. Throughout this thesis, terms such as misalignment, double vision, fragmentation, interruption, and recurrence function as a conceptual vocabulary for describing instability within memory, embodiment, and lived experience. Blurred edges, doubled forms, and punctures in the surface register a lag between experience and comprehension, especially in relation to grief, trauma, depression, memory, and embodied perception. Neon color functions as a counterpoint to delay, signaling persistence, …

Circling, Eun Yong Lee

Masters Theses

This thesis explores Korean aesthetic sensibilities from the perspective of material logic, placing at its core the process of reinterpreting and materializing them. Here, ※material logic§ refers to the relationships among materials that emerge from a particular group＊s accumulated understanding of materials, as well as from the ways in which they combine and use them.

Breathing Structures: Hygroscopicity Of Fibers., Nawal Urooj

Masters Theses

Cities like Singapore, Mumbai, Karachi, and regions of Ghana experience persistently hot and humid climates. In these regions, humidity in built environments significantly affects both human comfort and the durability of building materials. Yet traditional mechanical dehumidification strategies are energy-intensive, environmentally taxing, and socially uneven in their accessibility. We must challenge the existing systems for thermal comfort, the inefficient role Architecture plays in it, and the socio-economic politics associated with thermal comfort in developing countries.

Karachi, a coastal city in the south of Pakistan, has extremely high relative humidity and high temperatures throughout most of the year. In this region, …

Negotiating The Shoreline, Shuqi Hu

Masters Theses

This research examines sea otter reintroduction in Coos Bay as a spatial and temporal conflict between ecological processes and human activities. Through mapping and analysis, it identifies key misalignments between infrastructure, ecological rhythms, and human use.

Focusing on points of proximity, the project tests how landscape design can create conditions of visibility and engagement with coastal ecologies.

Rather than resolving large-scale conflicts, it proposes site-specific interventions that foster empathy and support adaptive relationships between human and non-human systems.

Care Ecologies Between Knots, Eliza R. Marris

Masters Theses

Discarded fibers like raw wool behave the way harm reduction does. Harm reduction resists stigma and works to move beyond assumptions and oversimplifications of substance use and addiction. Wool is irregular, complicated, and emotionally charged. It resists compression and maintains its own being even when pulled apart. Working with raw wool is in relationship with complexity, as is harm reduction.

At its core, harm reduction is grounded in thoughtfulness and empathy towards people, their lived experience, and its nuances. It is a witness to lives, memories, and imprints, acknowledging the entangled realities of addiction. Our detachment from fiber remainders, materials …

After Yellow Horse: From Passive Shelter To A Self-Sustaining Cycle, Xinyuan Liu

Masters Theses

Spatial flexibility—specifically, the ability of a single building to shift between therapeutic and productive use—offers a critical alternative to the institutional passivity of conventional care facilities, repositioning architecture as an active agent in both the financial sustainability of nonprofit organizations and the social recovery of their patients.

During my time volunteering at Yellow Horse Equine Therapy Center in Ashaway, Rhode Island, the core contradictions of the traditional equine therapy model became visible firsthand. Yellow Horse had operated for years on goodwill and volunteers. The daily reality of the facility was one of persistent understaffing: barn chores, groundskeeping, and routine maintenance …