Digital Commons Network^™

Anty 101h.52: Anthropology And The Human Experience, Erin D. Rosenkrance

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Anty 101h.Vh1: Anthropology And The Human Experience - Bitterroot, Jamie L. Ogden

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Anty 101h.80: Anthropology And The Human Experience - Honors, David Garret Kerr

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

From Sonvilier To Canada To Illinois: A Remarkable Swiss Emigration Story, Jeanette Bowman Borich

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Author and genealogist Laurence Overmire stated, “History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.”¹ His words resonate as we consider the 1821 Swiss emigration to the Red River Settlement (in today’s Manitoba, Canada) followed by their subsequent emigration to the Galena, Illinois, area. Three recently published books on the history of Galena’s earliest days as a city² make no mention of the Swiss Red River families as early pioneers.³ A fourth book,⁴ Le Canada et les Suisses by E. H. Bovay, also relatively recently written, tells a different story. Genealogical research about one’s ancestors and …

Soirée Suisse 2024, C. Naseer Ahmad

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Soirée Suisse stands out as one of the most unique and highly anticipated events in Washington, D.C. It takes place at a wonderful time of year when the summer heat begins to surrender to the cool breezes of autumn.

Vaxbot-Hpv: A Gpt-Based Chatbot For Answering Hpv Vaccine-Related Questions, Yiming Li, Jianfu Li, Manqi Li, Evan Yu, Danniel Rhee, Muhammad Amith, Lu Tang, Lara S Savas, Licong Cui, Cui Tao

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

OBJECTIVE: Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is an effective measure to prevent and control the diseases caused by HPV. However, widespread misinformation and vaccine hesitancy remain significant barriers to its uptake. This study focuses on the development of VaxBot-HPV, a chatbot aimed at improving health literacy and promoting vaccination uptake by providing information and answering questions about the HPV vaccine.

METHODS: We constructed the knowledge base (KB) for VaxBot-HPV, which consists of 451 documents from biomedical literature and web sources on the HPV vaccine. We extracted 202 question-answer pairs from the KB and 39 questions generated by GPT-4 for training and …

A Study On The Psychometric Properties Of The Chinese Version Of The Parent Tic Questionnaire, Qiang Ding, Douglas W. Woods, Kathryn E. Barber, Wen Xu, Ying Zhao, Shuqin Shen, Jinhua Sun

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

Introduction

The Parent Tic Questionnaire (PTQ) is a tool for parents to assess their child’s tic severity, but its effectiveness in non-Western contexts like China has not been thoroughly examined. This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the PTQ in assessing motor and vocal tic severity among Chinese children diagnosed with tic disorders.

Method

Parents of 268 Chinese children and adolescents aged 6–17 years, diagnosed with tic disorders, completed the PTQ. The study assessed tic severity using the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale (YGTSS) and PTQ. Additionally, obsessive-compulsive symptoms were measured using the Children Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale …

Instrument Adaptation For Measuring Early Child Language Development Across Multilingual And Sociocultural Diverse Settings, Heather Brookes, Frenette Southwood, Martin Mössmer, Patricia Makaure, Michelle J. White, Carmen Coetsee, Sefela L. Yalala, Helena Kruger, Mikateko Ndhambi, Sibusiso Ndlangamandla, Monicca T. Bhuda, Nina Brink, Nomfundo Buthelezi, William Jiyana, F. Portia Khumalo, Babalwa Ludidi, Muzi Matfunjwa, Lufuno Miriri, Nomsa Skosana

School of Psychology

This article describes the adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) for South Africa’s 11 official spoken languages. The CDI is a parent-report tool that measures early language development from 8 to 30 months. We developed cross-linguistically comparable CDIs, representing two distinct language families, West Germanic and southern Bantu, using a common protocol. We describe our approach to item construction and harmonization across languages and to obtaining sociodemographic information in different cultural settings. Issues such as language contact and variation, sampling, data collection, and quality control are discussed as well as item selection and instrument reliability and validity. This …

On The Ambiguity Of Wh-Expressions In Thai, Naparat Meechanyakul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation deals with an ambiguity problem of wh-indeterminates in Thai. Thai wh-phrases are indeterminates in that their interpretations depend on licensing conditions and structural environments. In this dissertation, observed ambiguous interpretations of object wh-arguments in Thai are described and analyzed through the lens of a phase-based approach under the Minimalist Program. The ambiguity problem concerns the fact that ʔàraj ‘what’ and khraj ‘who’ receive two possible interpretations, namely indefinite/NPI and interrogative, when they appear as an internal argument of serialized verb phrases and under c-commanding negation. Other wh-phrases in the language, namely the locative wh …

Does Treatment Setting In Ati Matter? An Examination Of Completion Rates And The Role Of Violent Charges Among Individuals With Co-Occurring Disorders, George J. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the proliferation of alternatives to incarceration (ATI) for individuals with co-occurring disorders in recent decades, little is known about comparative styles of treatment used in this context. The following study uses data from a case management service in a large urban city (n=273) where several types of treatment are utilized in the ATI landscape. Specifically, this study compares ATI completion rates and time to completion or failure for several styles of treatment: clinic-based outpatient, residential, assertive community treatment (ACT) and personalized recovery-oriented services (PROS) programs. Results of a logistic regression indicate that individuals initially referred to residential treatment had …

Back To The Margins: The Re-Marginalization Of Feedback Research In Composition And Rhetoric, Robert A. Greco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation applies content analysis, both quantitative and thematic, to publications exploring feedback on student writing by analyzing two corpora of texts published from 2000 to 2019: a systematic sample of 114 articles from 5 journals and excerpts from 5 guides for new instructors. For the journals’ corpus, the most significant emergent themes included error; affect, both instructors’ and students’; and technology. In the guides’ corpus, this study focused on guides’ assumptions about their audiences and discussed the “cycle of correction”—a pattern where guides have focused on cultivating and reinforcing core field values about feedback established between the mid-1980s and …

Modernity And The Promise Of Democracy: A Democratic Reading Of Machiavelli And Hobbes, Gabriel Garber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A review of the democratic scholarship on Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes reveals a tension between institutional and anti-institutional democratic interpretations. This reflects a knot in democracy itself. Miguel Vatter’s labels this knot ‘form and event’ in his democratic interpretation of Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s theory of form and event comes through an exploration of the tensions between structure, agency, rhetoric, and radical openness in the political realm. For Hobbes, the radically egalitarian state of nature produces one first and final event (the social contract) towards a world of strict form. The democratic interpreters have best noticed the tension between form and …

Unifying Comprehension And Competence Through Merge: A New Linking Hypothesis Connecting Electrophysiological Data To Linguistic Intuitions, Kevin Patrck Guzzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation integrates neuroscience and linguistics to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying syntactic processing. To do this, we focus on Early Syntactic Negativities (ESNs) which are rapid negative electrophysiological responses known to be elicited by phrase structure violations due to an unexpected lexical category. We examine ESNs elicited in two previously undocumented elliptical constructions, sluicing and swiping, employing event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral acceptability judgments. Our investigation builds upon Collins and Stabler’s (2016) formalization of minimalist syntax, proposing a novel Merge Hypothesis of ESNs. This hypothesis posits a direct link between ESNs and violations of the Merge operation, a fundamental …

Cueing Motions In A String Quartet, An Exploratory Study Of Motion Trajectories, Maren Rothfritz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A string quartet performance involves an array of different body movements which serve many functions, including sound production, expression, and communication. This dissertation examines the ways string quartet players execute specific communicative body motions called cues, which are anticipatory gestures meant to communicate tempo and timing as well as the musical intentions such as dynamics, articulation, and character to the co-performers. Some scholarly research exists on cueing, but a formalized description of the cueing motions involved has not yet been developed. This dissertation serves as an exploratory study examining the motion trajectories of cueing motions employed by the Argus Quartet, …

Chatgpt Didn’T Write This: Evaluating The Impact Of Llms With A Case Study In Grading Cuny Language Immersion Program Student Essays, Benjamin Inbar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study evaluates the capabilities and limitations of large language models (LLMs), specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, in grading essays from students in the City University of New York’s Language Immersion Program. The program serves English language learners with diverse linguistic and demographic backgrounds, offering intensive language instruction to prepare students for academic success in college. Using a dataset of 30 pre- and post-program essays scored by program instructors and ChatGPT-4o under three paradigms, this research explores the alignment between human and AI-generated scores across five rubric-based competency areas. Findings reveal that ChatGPT-4o aligns moderately with human grading, with the strongest agreement …

Freedom Pedagogy: Black Educators In The Urban North During The Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Centuries, Milagros Seraus-Roache

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Black educational history has been told through a predominantly Southern lens. This dissertation highlights the experiences of Black educators in the urban North during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Northern Black educators confronted the challenges of freedom—including the constant need to protect it—using a set of approaches influenced by the various intersecting social movements and intellectual currents of their day. While these educators represented a small minority of African Americans, their contributions were profound, leaving legacies that provide a lens for understanding and improving issues facing urban Black youth and their communities today.

In the absence of a comprehensive …

Mad At The System: The Mental Health Act Uk: Power And Control Of Racialized Women, Maithreyi Rajeshkumar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Whilst experiences of madness are multiple, fluid and multi-dimensional across spiritual and collective dimensions globally, the categorization and regulation of ‘madness’ have direct foundations in European colonial-capitalist-patriarchal frameworks, policies and systems. This work focuses on the institutions and structures of power, turning UK legislation and those who are trying to reform or change it, into objects of study. A particular piece of United Kingdom legislation is the primary case study for this work – the Mental Health Act 1983 which covers the rights, assessment and treatment of people diagnosed with a ‘mental disorder’. Women, who are detained under this Act …

Multi-Document Graph Visualizer: Bridging Computational Text Analysis And Interactive Visualization For Large-Scale Text Corpora, Atilio Barreda Ii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis introduces the Multi-Document Graph Visualizer (MDGV), a tool designed to analyze and visualize relationships within large-scale text corpora, addressing a critical gap in computational text analysis. By synthesizing state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) techniques with advanced interactive data visualization, MDGV empowers researchers across disciplines—including the sciences, social sciences, and humanities—to uncover latent connections, relationships, and patterns in vast and complex document collections. Importantly, MDGV requires limited technical expertise from its users, making it accessible to a broader audience of researchers and practitioners. This approach draws on Haraway's concept of situated knowledges, which emphasizes interpretability and engagement in …

Destabilizing The Nuyorican: Rivera’S Women And Nuyorican Cinema, Judith R. Escalona

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rivera’s Women, the Capstone, is a TV segment I produced for the CUNY-TV show Latinas that first aired June 27, 2023 (Pride). It grew out of an hour-long interview I conducted with playwright and screenwriter José Rivera as part of my research on Nuyorican Cinema, the films of the Puerto Rican Diaspora.

An unknown part of U.S. independent cinema, these diasporic films destabilize the way independent films continue to be categorized through gender, race, ethnicity, and language. Using the Capstone as a guide, I examine two of Rivera’s recent screen works that situate him within Nuyorican Cinema because of his …

The Role Of Acculturative Stress, Discrimination In Healthcare Settings, And Migration-Related Trauma On Hiv Prevention And Mental Health Among Immigrant Hispanic Sexual Minority Men: An Integrated Model Of Acculturation And Minority Stress, Jonathan Lopez Matos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation expands Minority Stress Theory (MST) by integrating the Fourfold Acculturation Model (FAM) to examine the impact of psycho-sociocultural stressors on health outcomes among immigrant Hispanic sexual minority men (HSMM) in the U.S. The study explored how language proficiency, acculturative stress, discrimination in healthcare, migration-related trauma, and stress-related growth influence HIV prevention behaviors and mental health. Survey data from 194 Spanish-speaking immigrant HSMM revealed that monolingual Spanish speakers experienced significantly higher acculturative stress than bilinguals. Acculturative stress significantly mediated the association between stressors and health outcomes, such as HIV testing and mental health symptoms. Discrimination and trauma were directly …

Embracing Language Diversity: An Exploration Of Elementary Teachers' Perception Of African American English, Manijeh Hart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Students of African descent often speak in a dialect that differs from the Dominant American English (DAE) dialect, known as African American English (AAE). Since this dialect is not considered mainstream, students who speak and write in this dialect may be at a disadvantage when being assessed on literacy skills and responding to literacy instruction. However, it is possible to address this issue by preparing and supporting teachers in recognizing AAE use in literacy activities and providing them with instructional strategies to support students who use AAE. The goal of this research was to investigate the perceptions that elementary school …

Lishmah: An Exploration Of Syntactic Ambiguity And Biblical Exegesis Through The Jewish Calendar Year, Shani Tzoref

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lishmah (Hebrew, meaning “for its own sake”) is a digital resource for exploring syntactic ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible and traditional Jewish biblical interpretation. Hosted on CUNY Manifold, it currently features twelve curated cases of syntactic ambiguity, each linked to a month of the Hebrew calendar, accompanied by annotated medieval Jewish commentaries.

The project employs digital tools for data compilation, presentation, and user interaction. While in its early stages, Lishmah aims to contribute to digital humanities by bridging traditional close reading with computational approaches and highlighting discourse analysis in biblical studies.
Future plans include developing Lishmah into a collaborative research …

Echoes Of Chinese Tradition: A Guide To Mandarin Diction Through Fixed-Ipa And Traditional Phonology, With Insights Into Intertwined Intonation Contours Of Chinese-American Art Songs, Xiaoming Tian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a comprehensive guide to Mandarin Chinese diction and articulation, rooted in traditional Chinese phonology and articulated through Fixed-International Phonetic Alphabet (Fixed-IPA). It unfolds in two primary segments, with the initial section delving into the historical underpinnings and phonetic nuances of traditional Chinese opera singing. This inquiry not only systematically introduces Chinese pronunciation rules but also illuminates the influence of traditional Chinese opera elements on contemporary Chinese art songs and operas. This part also reflects upon the significant strides made in Chinese language Romanization since the Wade-Giles system's introduction in the 19th century, discussing how it facilitated literacy …

Improving Low-Resource Translation With Finite State Grammars, Nicholas J. Uva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Scarcity of training data continues to pose a problem for the development of neural machine translation systems for low-resource languages. This study develops a method for the incorporation of linguistic information into the training of neural machine translation models for low-resource languages, using morphological grammars created using finite state transducers. This study explores the benefits, historical background, and effectiveness of this approach. This study incorporates morphological tags into a pre-trained multilingual neural machine translation model using a dual encoder structure. This study finds an improvement in performance in the Irish-English translation scenario. This method offers promising results with low computational …

Where The Landscape Inspires The Lines: Python-Based Workbooks And Digital Tools For Reading Yoshino Ki, Miaoling Xue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Where the Landscape Inspires the Lines (https://yoshinoki.info/) explores the intersection of premodern Japanese literature and digital humanities (DH) through an innovative online platform for reading, annotating, and coding. Centered on Yoshino ki 吉野記 (A Record of Yoshino), a seventeenth-century Japanese poetic travelogue authored by the poet and courtier Asukai Masaaki 飛鳥井雅章 (1611–1679), this project offers an interactive and immersive experience designed to meet the academic and research needs of a diverse group of scholars and students while advocating for a multilingual approach that challenges anglophone-centric biases often found in DH. To ensure consistency, the project uses Yoshino ki as a …

The Social Interpretation Of Surat Al-Balad And Its Impact On Addressing Poverty, Dr. Ali Abdul Aziz Sayour

Faculty Peer-Reviewed Papers | بحوث هيئة التدريس المحكمة

This research is titled The Social Interpretation of Surat Al-Balad and Its Impact on Addressing Poverty answers a question: How does Surat Al-Balad, through its interpretation from a social perspective, provide solutions to the phenomenon of poverty prevalence? The research has two topics: the first is indicating the research terminology, and the second is dividing Surat Al-Balad into Four Sections; each section contains several verses presenting a method that contributes to addressing poverty. In this research, both descriptive and deductive methodology was used. It concluded with several results, including: proving that Surat Al-Balad provides us with a model that is …

Analyzing The Creation And Use Of Abbreviations In Cardiology And Cardiac Imaging Society Guidelines., Christopher R. Green, Rui Zhang, Raymond F. Stainback, Sofia W. Ye, Daniel Forsha, Enrique Garcia-Sayan, Jeffrey C. Hill, Carol Mitchell, Vera H. Rigolin, Vandana Sachdev, Partho P. Sengupta, Vincent L. Sorrell, Jordan B. Strom, Alexander M. Ye, Cynthia C. Taub

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

BACKGROUND: Abbreviation use in clinical and academic cardiology is widespread, yet there are few guidelines regulating the creation and utilization of abbreviations. Inconsistent abbreviations can introduce ambiguity and pose challenges to practice and research.

OBJECTIVES: The authors aimed to analyze how abbreviations are created and utilized in general cardiology and cardiac imaging society guidelines in order to assess whether ambiguities and discrepancies exist between societies.

METHODS: Abbreviation data were collected from 7 national and international societies of general cardiology and cardiac imaging over a 6-year span (2018-2023). Data were linguistically coded for abbreviation type, unique occurrence, meaning or sense count, …

Enhanced Approach For Japanese Teaching Quality Evaluation In Higher Education Under Plithogenic Sets, Yifan Liang

Neutrosophic Sets and Systems

Japanese language instruction has drawn more attention in the twenty-first century, a time of frequent international interactions and the rapid advancement of knowledge. Colleges and universities are now concentrating on raising the standard of Japanese education going forward as a result. To improve teaching quality, we must strengthen the entire management of teaching quality, particularly the evaluation of instructors' instruction. However, it is challenging to translate the evaluation results into a mathematical analytical formula because there are several elements that affect the quality of instruction, and the weight of each factor changes. We proposed a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methodology …

Freedom Dreams Of Young Black Boys: A Qualitative Study Among Black Male Elementary School Learners, Lamar Ok

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The work conducted in this research builds on the work of many who have also worked to provide a platform to illuminate the voices of Black folks, especially Black boys. This research is not the first to make the case that Black boys are as fully human as anyone else, and yet they have internalized the white gaze, even as they are proud of their blackness, their color, their race, their culture. However, there exists limited research with Black boys in elementary school, particularly before the 5th grade (before 10 years of age).

This project was about freedom dreaming—a collective …

Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia With Pathogenic Variant In Mapt Presenting As Dementia With Lewy Body Disease, Tianxu Xia, Clara Li, Ayuko Iverson, Jessica Spat-Lemus, Amy Woroch, Georges Naasan

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

A 75-year-old right-handed Chinese American man presented to behavioral neurology clinic for a second opinion of dementia with Lewy body disease (DLB). The clinical history indicated a progressive multi-domain cognitive impairment starting in 2021 and including recurrent well-formed visual hallucinations, parkinsonism, dysautonomia, hypersomnia, apathy and paranoid delusions. The clinical manifestations met the criteria for a probable DLB diagnosis. In addition, family reported personality changes, disinhibition and compulsive behaviors, which suggested prefrontal cortex dysfunction. Brain MRI revealed disproportionate volume loss in the bilateral frontal lobes including the orbitofrontal cortices. Family history revealed that multiple firstand second-degree relatives had been diagnosed with …