Digital Commons Network^™

Gerontoludic Character Design: Creating Engaging Player Characters For Older Adults, Robin Noelle Koman

Theses

In this thesis, findings of research in gerontoludic character design, in other words the design of game player characters focused upon the needs, wants, and expectations of older adults, are delivered. To support these findings, there is a review of qualitative and quantitative literature on ageism, including the impact of aging stereotypes and assumptions upon technology driven industries such as the game industry. This exploration of the roots of ageism includes an examination of how ageism affects the frequency and nature of older adult characters, both playable and non-playable, found in video games. Part of the justification of this topic …

A Proposal For A Survey Of American Art History Course: An Intersectional Approach, Fernando Mejia

Theses

The purpose of this project is to propose and create a course surveying American art history that currently is not offered at the Los Angeles Community College (LACCD). The creation of this course is important because it will fill a void within the curriculum in art history at LACCD. Most importantly, however, the course will offer students interested in American art an opportunity to take this course at the community college, which will prepare them for upper-division coursework before transferring, allowing them to focus on upper-division courses in the field. The Thesis Project addresses the state-of-field in the teaching of …

Web For All – An Accessibility Website, Kirsten Hawkes

Theses

This project focuses on how to improve awareness and implementation of web accessibility. The primary focus of the webforall.tech website is to provide a guide of best practices for web accessibility and a list of resources. The aim of the project is to create a website that provides UX designers and developers with the tools to design with accessibility in mind. Furthermore, the project involves testing the website with a survey and usability testing sessions to inform the updates and improvements implemented.

The Effects Of Therapeutic Arts On Black Mental Health, Alicia Newsome

Theses

This project focuses on black mental health that encompasses mental wellness education through social media and builds community connection by sharing stories. It reduces social exclusion and creates positive change in black communities. The final deliverable will be a short video poem compilation via YouTube that gives insight into what it is like living with depression and anxiety. It will include motion graphics, photo manipulation, and graphic art covers titled Misconceptions, Beautiful Temptations, Relentless, and Old Abuse. It is about implementing healthy coping mechanisms and bringing together a community that is often overlooked and/or stigmatized regarding mental health. It enhances …

Cross-Cultural Currents And Syncretism In Early Modern Opossum Iconography, Deniz Martinez

Theses

Opossums (Order Didelphimorphia) are marsupial mammals endemic to the Americas. They are also the first marsupials Europeans ever encountered, over a century before any Australasian species. Because of their unique marsupial characteristics, opossums have historically been viewed as an “anomalous” animal form across both Indigenous American and European cultures, and thus developed a rich and complex transatlantic cultural history. By tracing the development of opossum imagery through the millennia, one can uncover clear patterns of how their distinct features became embedded in iconographies relative to biogeocultural sphere, and how certain iconographic conventions were transmitted through various media both within and …

Creating Better Musicians Through Musicality: A Guide To Building An Instructional Unit, Shelby Leo

Theses

This project provides an in depth focus on how to strengthen an ensemble's approach to musicality through lesson plans, assessments, and activities. The primary focus group of this project is high school aged performance based classes including band and choir. The aim of the project is to provide a music educator with a detailed curriculum to teach musicality that is adjustable to any size ensemble and any score. Furthermore, this project is not a study but instead an explanation to the approach of developing the curriculum unit. The project consists of a four unit curriculum with two to three lessons …

Cult Of Propaganda: Monastic Dominance As Displayed In Canterbury Cathedral's Saintly Iconography, Jon Talvin Breazeale

Theses

This thesis examines the iconography in the windows of the Early English saints Dunstan and Alphege as depicted in England’s Canterbury Cathedral. In the windows of St. Dunstan, one can see how the saint saves the monarchs from the flames of hell. It also shows what can happen to those that would question or challenge the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The windows of St. Alphege show a dedicated man of the church ready to give his life to help save the town’s people from an unruly group of invaders. These windows were added to the eastern arm of …

The Taxonomy Of Extinction: Brian Jungen’S Tombstone, Jasen Evoy

Theses

This thesis focuses on the recent work (Tombstone, 2019) by Brian Jungen, a Canadian artist of mixed European and Dane-zaa heritage. The work is explored in detail, leveraging concepts present in Jungen’s existing body of work to extract intent and meaning through Jungen’s complex use of space, materiality, and iconography. Tombstone is a large scale, multimedia sculpture consisting of white plastic Rubbermaid stepstools cut and assembled into the form of a turtle or tortoise shell resting on a bank of thirty-seven black filing cabinets. While Tombstone initially presents itself as aesthetically sparse, it is a deeply-layered commentary on inequity, power …

Creating A Social Media Marketing Strategy For A Small Business, Kaila Trowbridge

Theses

As the world continues to digitalize, it has never been more crucial to use and understand social media when running a business of any size. Social media is where people share their ideas, experiences, and information with the world. People can reach a larger audience once they grow their profiles and understand who the audience truly is. From a business standpoint, social media should be used to display products, services, and develop an open relationship with the audience and customers.

The Restaurant Meals Program: A Guide For New York State’S Successful Implementation, Evan Cohen

Theses

In October 2021, New York State (NYS) Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law legislation enacting the Restaurant Meals Program (RMP) to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The RMP is an extension of SNAP, allowing eligible SNAP recipients to spend their benefits at restaurants. The goal of the RMP is to allow a targeted SNAP population—the elderly, disabled, and homeless—to have greater accessibility to purchase prepared, low-cost, hot meals that would otherwise be out of reach. Restaurant Meals Programs are currently enacted in just six states. Few analyses have evaluated its strengths and weaknesses. By identifying the RMP-eligible population’s food-related …

Life Is Short Life Is Long, Conor Martin

Theses

In this paper I discuss my thesis book project Life is Short Life is Long which uses ten years of photographs to conjure an intimate memory of my life in my twenties throughout the American landscape. I discuss the purpose of the work and the conceptual foundation of a book with 360 pictures along with direct influences like Robert Frank, Boris Mikhailov, Nan Goldin, and Garry Winogrand, all artists whose work comes directly from the intersection of personal observation and public spectacle. The second part of this paper addresses my graphic printed work, which was a main part of the …

Capturing The San Francisco Sound: Psychedelic Posters Of The 1960s Counterculture, Hannah Riley

Theses

The heart of 1960s American counterculture was in San Francisco. Here a hub of different people blended to reject mainstream American values and prioritize experimentation, creativity, and a freer way of life. Through art, performance, drugs, light shows, fashion, and rock music, a psychedelic scene was created. Rock music became the center of the psychedelic scene, and the San Francisco sound was developed with a new subculture of rock called acid rock, or psychedelic rock, that empowered the counterculture. The bands that highlighted the San Francisco sound include Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. …

Investigating Vector Space Embeddings For Database Schema Management, Goldy Malhotra

Theses

Text generation in the area of natural language processing as part of the artificial intelligence field has been greatly improving over the last several years. Here we examine the application of vector space word embeddings to provide additional information and context during the text generation process as a way to improve the resultant output through the lens of database normalization. It is known that words encoded into vector space that are closer together in distance generally share meaning or have some semantic or symbolic relationship. This knowledge, paired with the known ability of recurrent neural networks in learning sequences, will …

Within The Hour, Jacob Dowis

Theses

In our hyper-connected, present-day reality, many people think of solitude as a strange or lonely aspect of life. Over the last two years, I have been exploring themes of solitude by isolating individuals in composition. I first began the project primarily by photographing myself and the landscape around me, including both residential and public areas that I would find myself in. The concept grew from the isolation I felt when first moving here for school during the Covid pandemic. It was the first time I was living on my own, and in addition, I was moving to a new city …

Sustainable Applications Of Biochar Derived From Food Waste And Paper Feedstocks, Steven T. Barber

Theses

There is general agreement in the scientific literature that carbon sequestration is an important tool to mitigate human-induced climate change, but current methods are lacking scalability and economic viability. Though charcoal has been a common fuel for millennia, it has only very recently been purposefully created to sequester carbon. This carbon dense material, called biochar, has been extensively studied as a soil amendment though less studied for industrial applications. Chapter 1 provides an in-depth overview and background discussion of the history and definitions of biochar, distinguishing it from closely related though often misconstrued terms like charcoal, activated carbon, and carbon …

Detection Of Hateful Comments On Social Media, Essa Alzarouni

Theses

Social media usage has grown tremendously in the contemporary communication landscape. Along with its numerous benefits, some users abuse the channels by spreading hatred, far from the intended purpose of building connections on a personal level. To date, an empirical method for detecting, quantifying, and categorizing hateful comments on social networks comprehensively and proactively is still lacking. Besides, majority of the cases remain unreported due to social confounders such as fear of victimization and the psychological implications of hateful comments, leading to a situation whereby, the detrimental effect of the situation is underestimated. The ill-defined situation in the growing online …

Identifying Psychological Mental Disorders Through Machine Learning, Mohammad Al Abdooli

Theses

Psychology is the Study of Human Behavior and the various ways of thinking in it’s both consciousness and unconsciousness mind as this field is still growing to various fields such as Sports, Criminal and even Administrative Psychology through, Furthermore, This Study aims to shape and accommodate both fields of Sciences together, There are very few Scholars and Researches done on Medical Mental Health from a Data Analytics perspective, examining the datasets of the patients ICD-11 or DSM-5 scores and correlating it with the patients well-being, family medical history or any accident the patient have been through, so the current study …

Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy And Governments Challenges, Laila Abdin

Theses

Governments face the challenge of increasing the number of people who have been infected. Millions of daily examinations are being conducted around the world to detect the disease. The pandemic is growing increasingly challenging as the number of confirmed cases increases. Governments encounter a variety of obstacles in approving the benefits of Covid-19 vaccinations. Indeed, the idea of getting vaccinated is still fuzzy, and does vaccination protect against infectious disease? There are a lot of questions floating around. The lack of clear information about the Covid-19 vaccine will stymie the growing number of people who have been immunized. Therefore, governments …

Reducing A Dog’S Problem Behavior Using Functional Communication Training: A Case Study, Audrey Blunt, Robbie Hanson

Theses

Many dogs are relinquished to animal shelters and subsequently euthanized each year due to problem behaviors, such as excessive barking (ASPCA, n.d.). Unfortunately, punishment-based procedures (e.g., bark collars) have been commonly used to reduce these behaviors, despite negative side-effects such as escape and aggression. Functional communication training (FCT) involves teaching a replacement behavior that is functionally equivalent to the problem behavior and is a documented strategy to reduce problem behaviors in humans (e.g., Carr & Durand, 1985). In the current study, one 11-month old dog who had a history of whining, mouthing, and pawing was taught to mand (request) for …

(Un)Tethered, Morgan Sychtysz

Theses

(Un)Tethered is an exploration of my tendency to simultaneously build and deconstruct metaphorical structures throughout my life. This written thesis discusses visual metaphors implemented within the installation and prints, such as line and pattern, which represent my personal idiosyncrasies. These elements are realized as motifs such as step ladders, organic matter, and fibrous materials (crocheted, knotted, frayed, etc.) symbolizing my need for a thoroughly calculated life. Fibrous materials are ideal for representing my obsessive tendencies as they are continuous and malleable. One strand of torn fabric can be wrapped countless times around the crocheted form beneath, symbolizing a compulsion with …

Falling Through The Cracks: Two Understudied Populations In The Criminal Justice System, Ashley Hum

Theses

This capstone project aims to identify gaps in the criminal justice literature by examining how the criminal justice system interacts with demographic groups that have been historically overlooked in traditional criminal justice studies, specifically Asian Americans as a racial/ethnic group and LGBTQIA+ individuals of any race or gender identity.

An overarching narrative and finding in the first two sections of the following project is how constructed identities construct narratives and policies. Importantly, the constructed identities are most often assigned by those in power to Asian Americans or LGBTQIA+ people, rather than created for themselves by in-group members, and then become …

Using Information Technology Tools To Help Address Company Supply Chain Communication Challenges: A Case Of Workflow Processes, Akinola Samuel Olorunfemi

Theses

The evolution of cloud computing is one of the major and recent developments in the computing world. Cutting-edge web technology applications have improved the manner in which business is conducted, allowing organizations to deliver business projects effectively. Microsoft SharePoint is an enterprise content management system that provides a collaborative platform for end users to design, monitor and execute business processes. It provides core functionality such as the ability to quickly undertake reporting, provision collaboration sites, and a sophisticated document repository featuring collaboration necessities. This study reviews the limitations of the current part setup workflow using email at Company XYZ, and …

I Like To Think You Can Still Hear Me, Sage Green

Theses

My work performs the act of mourning. In this body of photographs, I resurrect the items previously owned by my great-grandmother as I explore the new reality those who are living face after losing a loved one. I am curious about how we grieve and remember moments from the past. Asking myself the question, when we no longer can physically hold onto our loved ones, what are the ways that we can still find moments of connection? I use the ambiguity offered by the lumen print process to illuminate the trace of the past in the presence. I examine and …

Problematic Social Media Use In The Context Of Romantic Relationships: Relation To Attachment, Emotion Regulation, And Motivations For Use, Eleni Gogos

Theses

Social media is an increasingly popular form of connecting with others, especially among young adults, but problematic social media use (PSMU) has become a growing concern. Research has shown that people with anxious attachment styles and poor emotion regulation have a greater likelihood of having PSMU (Liu & Ma, 2019), but how social media usage might play a role in these relationships has not been well-studied. This research asked if the association between anxious attachment and PSMU will be affected by both emotion regulation and online social surveillance in romantic relationships as mediating influences. We utilized advanced mobile phone features …

Notifications, Ashraf Agili

Theses

The notification system is essential in our daily life. It grabs the user's attention to a specific situation that needs the user's action. Such as responding to an important message. However, the notification system can be less effective due to the limited features and frequently failing to display enough appropriate information. What if the notification system can allow users to respond, share and save notifications? The current notification system directs us to apps that divert our focus away, where there is no way to respond to all types of notifications within the notification. Long and unorganized notification pages created by …

Study Island, Xiran Wang

Theses

This thesis project is in providing a better distance learning experience for students. Distance learning can be considered a tangible and interactive learning experience. The disadvantage of distance learning is the lack of learning environment and interactivity, which may lead to problems such as inattentive students learning inefficiently. It follows the use of the Internet to create an interactive and interesting distance learning platform. Students experience a more real sense of effective learning efficiency, enhance communication between students, and better complete their learning plans with mutual help. Students also provide good contact information when they go home, enhancing communication between …

You Can See Me But You Can't Find Me, Eric Bohrer

Theses

I finesse the atmospheric value of objects— the gestural systems brought forward in their material and forms. As Baudrillard describes, the tools we use and the furnishings we live among are increasingly defined by their formal adherence to systems of control. Individual function is suppressed for the sake of a homogeneous interrelationship between multiple objects. Through the use of a gestural system that prioritizes effort instead, objects are defined by instinct as opposed to cultural connotation. Material is liberated from the increasingly abstracted contemporary discourse surrounding its use and the object as a whole is allowed to retake an anthropomorphic …

Anonymous Objects, Haidong Qin

Theses

My thesis project uses compositional strategies to de-contextualize images and exploits photography's inherent ambiguity in form and content. My photographs reveal an artificial environment established by isolating everyday objects and turning them into abstractions. Using formal strategies, these objects are detached from their original environments and re-interpreted. The significance of the objects no longer relies on their social functions, but on how they appear in the two-dimensional composition. Thus, the resulting images become new facts through the photographic process. A photograph is not only an image, but also an autonomous conceptual and physical object. My work reinforces an object-like quality …

What Is Assertiveness?, Mirjana Trifunovic

Theses

My main aim is to define assertiveness, to distinguish assertiveness from aggressiveness, and to raise the question of whether we should be assertive. Most articles on assertiveness are from the field of psychology. In psychology, assertiveness is defined as a healthy way of expressing oneself. But what does assertiveness mean? How should we define assertiveness and is assertiveness desirable, or is it closely connected to aggressiveness? Should we say that assertiveness is a part of our character, an innate quality, or an acquired skill? In this thesis, I will define assertiveness and show how to distinguish assertiveness from aggressiveness. Most …

Hear You, Chenyang Mu

Theses

"Hear You" is a thesis that explores how my relationship with glass is used to discuss the connection and interaction between sound, shape, material, and surrounding things. I trace the origins of these interests related to my sensitive and introverted character since I was a child and how it has influenced my interests in communicating in unique visual and audible ways. This thesis links personal experience to scholarly research into sensory processing, high sensitivity personality traits, the concept of quiet, and the power of sound. "Hear You" concludes with an assessment of a body of work that merges interests in …