English Language and Literature Commons^™

Improving High School Students’ Workforce Literacy Through Collaborative, Online Alternative Reality Games, Jon Balzotti

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This project analyzed student engagement in a high school setting using digital learning environments based on a semi-realistic workplace simulation. The research team explored the challenges of high school student engagement in both traditional and digital learning environments. Data from student surveys suggest that traditional role-play in the classroom can be as effective as digital simulations in engaging student learners. While previous scholarship has focused on the advantages ARGs offer technical fields, very few have created short-term, adaptable simulations that take full advantage of the available technologies that people use regularly (texting, email, interviews through video clips, etc.) to explore …

Fairy-Tale Teleography And Visualizations (Fttv), Jill Terry Rudy

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Evaluation of Academic Objectives This project has leveraged data processing and visualization methods that are becoming significant paradigms in digital humanities scholarship; specifically, we have repositioned the existing teleography of fairy tales on television from Channeling Wonder into a data corpus that can be mined and analyzed visually, spatially, and temporally.

Perscriptivist Rules By Type Finding The Values In English Usage Manuals, Delaney Barney, Don Chapman

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The popular view of usage manuals like Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) and Garner’s Modern American Usage (2003) is that they contain a well-established set of rules. We expect to find the same language rules we’ve been practicing since elementary school: say may I instead of can I when asking for permission, spell with “I” before “E,” and don’t split infinitives. Because most people only have one or two usage guides that they consult regularly, it’s easy to believe that they all have the same rules. I was interested in finding out how much variation there is from book to …

Exploration Of Creative Nonfiction Writing In Reykjavik, Rachel Dalrymple, Joohn Bennion

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this project was to increase my understanding of nonfiction writing by collaborating with prominent nonfiction writers at the NonfictioNow conference in Reykjavik in June 2017. Following the conference, I created a portfolio of nonfiction essays. Selections of these essays were submitted to BYU’s Fall 2017 literary journal Inscape, and they will be submitted to the 2018 Carroll, Mayhew, and Mckay essay contests.

Poets Of Resistance: Restoring Life To The Student Writings Of The Intermountain Indian School, Terence Wride, Michael Taylor

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In hopes of permanently removing them from their Indigenous cultures and communities, from 1950 to 1984, thousands of Navajo and other American Indian children were sent to Brigham City, Utah to attend the Intermountain Indian School, the largest of nineteen postwar federal Indian boarding schools that remained in operation. Despite the deplorable tactics of a final institutionalized attempt to “kill the Indian and save the man” through the federal boarding school system, this project has celebrated the creative achievements of IIS students and their ability to actively resist assimilation and preserve their Indian identities through the production of sophisticated literary …

Change For Women, Change The World, Kiana Stewart, Dr. Daryl Lee

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My project goal was to translate from French to English significant chapters of a study on gender-based violence (GBV) in Senegal documented by Dr. Fatou Diop Sall. Dr Sall is the head coordinator of GESTES, a Senegalese research group focused on gender equality. A previous group of BYU students and ORCA recipients translated sections of the document that focused on domestic violence, and published the translation with the WomanStats Project, which is the largest statistical database regarding the status of women in the world (Hudson, 2015). The chapters I translated deal with GBV in different spheres, specifically educational spaces (schools, …

Dorothy Wordsworth’S Travel Writings: A Digital Critical Edition, Nicholas Mason

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Thanks to the MEG award we received in 2014-15, my colleague Paul Westover and I have been able to mentor six outstanding BYU students in archival research and scholarly editing and have made significant progress toward the publication of a major new critical edition of the works of the nineteenth-century poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth.

The Essay Genome Project, Patrick Madden

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This project utilized computational analysis to evaluate essays. Through stylometry, the study of writing style, the team studied essayists’ work to delineate writerly heritage, to identify potential authorship, and to recognize trends and answer questions about literary genre. From our analysis, we were able to identify preliminary points of demarcation among essayists due to style, time period, location, and subgenre. The primary subgenre which we examined over the course of the project was the “lyric essay,” a recently popular form which has uncertain characteristics we wanted to elucidate. As we examined essays classified as “lyric” we were able to corroborate …

The Critically Annotated Collected Works Of Elisa Von Der Recke And Women’S Articles In Vienna’S “Die Neue Freie Presse:” A Digital Companion To Red Vienna, White Socialism And The Blues: Ann Tizia Leitich’S America, Michelle James, Rob Mcfarland

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Without funding there would be no Sophie project, which is why the first item in this report on the Sophie activities during 2015 must be an expression of our gratitude to both the ORCA office and to the College of Humanities, on behalf of the faculty members involved, and particularly, on behalf of the many students whose lives have been enriched in numerous ways by their Sophie work. We are aware of the many projects vying for your attention and funding, and are particularly grateful for the support you have given this project over the years. Your grants have enriched …

Victorian Short Fiction Project, Leslee Thorne-Murphy

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Our project was to prepare a digital collection of short stories, The Victorian Short Fiction Project (VSFP), for a scholarly review process. The VSFP is a digital anthology of Victorian-era short stories compiled and edited by students in undergraduate Victorian literature classes here at BYU. Leslee Thorne-Murphy designed the project to expand students’ knowledge of the Victorian-era short story, an under-studied genre in the field of Victorian literature, and to give them experience in the fields of scholarly editing and the digital humanities. Students would conduct research in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections library to find short fiction to …

Of Angles And Angels: Political Unity And Spiritual Identity In Anglo-Saxon England, 871 – 1016, Susannah Morrison, Miranda Wilcox

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This project examined the development of English nationalism in the ninth and tenth centuries. Prior to this moment in the island’s history, England had been divided into a series of independent and self-governing kingdoms, including Mercia in the Midlands, Wessex in the West Country, Northumbria, stretching from the Humber River north into southeastern Scotland, and East Anglia in modern-day Norfolk and Suffolk. However, under the pressure of violent Viking expansion, these ancient kingdoms were largely dissolved. Only Wessex, under the leadership of the legendary Alfred the Great, survived essentially intact, and able to exert its cultural and political hegemony over …

Using Reading Strategies To Differentiate Reading Instruction, Kari Allsup, Dawan Coombs

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Struggling readers have often developed learning strategies, but not strategies that help them become better readers. Consider, a student who is checked out every day before English to avoid the discomfort of reading aloud, a student who gets up every few minutes to sharpen pencils to avoid a difficult task, a student who knows how to look busy in ways that disguise a lack of comprehension. In contrast to these strategies, reading strategies can empower students to succeed, not merely avoid reading. This study examined three reading strategies within the context of a reader’s theatre focused on the drama, The …

Keep Them Coming: Discovering Why Upper-Division Students Use The Writing Center, Ethan Marston, David Stock

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Because the development of writing skills is crucial to professional success, many writing center studies attempt to determine how to best encourage undergraduate students to attend their university writing centers. Many universities require freshmen to attend the writing center while enrolled in a first-year writing class. Because of this, a large portion of writing center research focuses on the effectiveness of this requirement, and its impact on students’ perceptions of and experiences with the writing center (Bell and Stutts, 1997; Bishop, 1990; Clark, 1985; Gordon, 2008; Rendleman, 2013). This research added to the extensive debate over whether or not writing …

Emotional Truth In Fiction, Tamara Thomson, Stephen Tuttle

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In the early 1990s I had the opportunity to work closely with a group of youth patients, staff members, and clinicians at the Utah State Hospital. During that time there were several accusations of misconduct of staff with the youth patients, some of whom I knew personally. My project has been to create six short stories dealing with the experiences of both the youth patients and the staff at the State Hospital that are based on the interviews I did with former patients, clinicians, and staff. I wanted to investigate the way specific individuals remembered incidents of misconduct and how …

Annotated Edition Of The Reminiscences Of Nate Salsbury, Katie Bowman, Frank Christianson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this project was to prepare the unpublished manuscript Reminiscences of Nate Salsbury, written in the 1890s, for publication and to enter the critical conversation on the development of the frontier myth in American history. The first of three stages of the project was to do editorial work on the raw manuscript. The editing goal was to organize and clarify the narrated episodes of Nate Salsbury’s life in order to prepare it for optimal audience comprehension. Second, I thoroughly annotated the document and curated an appendix that situated the document in its historical and biographical context. Third, …

Annie Oakley Research, Hope Collins, Frank Christianson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

For my project I researched Annie Oakley. I specifically was looking into how Annie Oakley added complexity to the American Frontier Myth and how she interacted with William F. Cody who was also known as Buffalo Bill.

The purpose of my project was to contribute to a scholarly edition of The Autobiography of Annie Oakley. To accomplish this, I worked through these three steps: I edited and annotated the autobiography, wrote a critical introduction essay, and gathered material for appendixes to the manuscript.

Healing The Hurt: Creating A Graphic Novel That Repairs The Damage Of Mental Health Problems, Alyssa Carpenter, Chris Crowe

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Since I was sixteen, I have struggled with self-harm and depression. One of my coping mechanisms was reading. I would read and read and read in search of a solution where my sadness and despondent nature would be whisked away into a made up world where all the problems were solvable and light always won out over darkness. However, many of the books I read simply thrust me deeper into my depressive state. Young adult literature is always and forever on the cusp of breaking the social taboos that exist in society, which often mean that these books deal with …

Reflections In Detroit: The Personal Essay As Epistemological Method, Greg Wurm, Joey Franklin

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of my project was to explore and demonstrate how the personal essay could be used as more than just a literary form of the humanities, but as an epistemological method in the social sciences. I built off the work of Dr. Andrew Abbott, of the University of Chicago, who, in 2007, proposed what he called “lyrical sociology.” In his piece, “Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology,” he described that a lyrical sociology sought to “communicate its author’s emotional stance toward his or her object of study, rather than to ‘explain’ that object.” The personal essay has also …

Mormon Insights, Shane Peterson, Marvin Gardner

Journal of Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Ali: A Novel, Joshua Sabey, Stephen Tuttle

Journal of Undergraduate Research

When I was in high school, my family hosted an Iraqi student named Ali. He eventually went AWOL (absent without leave) and we were able to help him get political asylum. Since then I have built friendships and collected stories from several other Iraqi students that I have now compiled into a book.

“See, You Are A Reader”: Using Graphic Novels To Help Struggling Readers, Stephen Nothum, Dawan Coombs

Journal of Undergraduate Research

I set out on this project to evaluate how the emerging genre of graphic novels could be used in the junior high English classroom to help struggling students develop the skills they need to not only enjoy reading but engage with literature in a meaningful way. By getting into classrooms and watching struggling students engage with comics and graphic novels, I have come to the conclusion that this genre is perfectly suited for helping students develop reading and analysis skills.

A Mormon Theology Of Immigration: Liberation Theology In The Restored Church Of Christ, Jenna Carson, Jason Kerr

Journal of Undergraduate Research

I wrote an academic paper arguing that Latter-day Saint doctrine, especially the Law of Consecration, provides the foundation for a specific theology of liberation that can be placed in conversation with traditional liberation theology put forth by Gustavo Gutierrez. I then put the theology to work by presenting the contemporary Mexico-U.S. immigration phenomenon as a case study. I argued that liberation theology helps members of the Church better understand current LDS Church policy regarding the treatment of individuals living without documentation in the United States.

“‘All That Glisters Is Not Gold’: Gender Representation And Theatrical Performances Of The Merchant Of Venice From 1998 To 2015”, Catherine Hollingsworth, Rick Duerden

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The Merchant of Venice poses problems concerning the representation—a social and cultural construction—of gender and Judaism. Some critics wonder whether or not this play should be performed now: could and should modern audiences experience The Merchant of Venice? This study argues that this play should be performed today and has merit, not only for aesthetic but also for social reasons. The play forces audiences to confront how gender is represented in theatrical productions and question our own perspectives. What we gain from this experience is the following: by addressing these concerns in the play, the audience recognizes the unjust …

Digital Archive Of Mental Health Narratives, Elisabeth Anna Muldowney, Jon Balzotti

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Narratives have the power to help people understand experiences that are foreign to them. But narratives focusing only on a single dimension of a story have the potential to cause harm, as many popular depictions of eating disorders demonstrate. Common eating disorder narratives often correctly acknowledge that mental health challenges occur in result-driven communities. The category “result-driven” refers to environments that associate value and success with physically measurable achievements or unrealistic aesthetics. Some of these communities include dance, sports, acting, and modeling. Recent research has suggested categorizing religious groups with communities that potentially contribute to eating disorders.¹

Using Reading Strategies To Teach Students Close Reading, Colleen Mcquay, Dawan Coombs

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The Common Core State Standards call for students to be better able to comprehend and close read literature when it states that students will be able to “read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.”¹ However, even though this is what the standards are calling for, the concern is how educators can better teach and aid students in gaining skills that will contribute to increased close reading and comprehension. While research upholds the importance of these skills for academic and career success,² it lacks in discussing the implementation of strategies …

Barbara D’Austria: Women And Religious Upheaval In 16th-Century Europe, Victoria Fox, Brandie Siegfried

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this project was to recover source documents regarding the life of a significant 16th-century woman who has been otherwise largely left out of history. Barbara d’Austria, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I and Anna of Bohemia and Hungary, was an intensely religious and ambitious woman who was said to have used her own funds to provide shelter for women who had been displaced by an earthquake. But other than this general knowledge, and a few poems written at her marriage celebration by Torquato Tasso, little else has been developed regarding her life and influence. After scouring …

Including Religion In Gender: Lds Men’S Experiences In Masculinity-Making, Ashley Brocious, Dr. Leslee Thorne-Murphy

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Studies in masculinity have grown significantly in the last decades as conversations concerning gender have become more conscious of the meanings and constructions of gender in men’s experiences. Masculinity studies at its core questions the assumption that men have already achieved gender equality. Rather than blanketing all men into categories of privilege, patriarchy, or even neutrality, it seeks to give more nuance to men’s experiences and the transactional nature of their masculinity in the world around them. Latter-day Saint feminists have considered differences between men’s and women’s experiences and voices an important topic. The importance of women’s narratives as a …

Portraits Of An Immigrant Population: A Look Into The Life Of Mexican Migrant Workers In Florida, Jenna Carson, Patrick Madden

Journal of Undergraduate Research

I wrote creative non-fiction essays about my experiences with Mexican migrant workers living in Florida. Originally, I planned to focus primarily on their stories of survival in order to increase awareness among U.S. citizens; I wanted readers to understand many of the complications of illegal immigration, and therefore, better understand the Mexican “Other.” Surprisingly, I focused more on my own experiences with migrant workers and how my life has been changed by them (rather than simply record their life stories). I realized that my own experiences and meditations could foster compassion, understanding, and tolerance.

More Than A Feeling: The Transmission Of Affect And Group Identity, Lauren Fine, Brian Jackson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

We’ve all experienced moments where we walk in and feel the tension in the room. Even before our minds can process what’s happening, we start to mirror the emotions of the people we’re around. Instances like this, where the emotion (or affect) one person is feeling subconsciously triggers a similar affect in someone else, are possible through what neuroscientists refer to as the transmission of affect. The physiological shift that influences the receiver’s emotions is triggered through visual, auditory, and olfactory cues (pheromones).

Making A Case For Mark Twain’S A Horse’S Tale: Twain’S Use Of Templates And Myths As His Highest Moralism, Sara Guggisberg, Dr. Frank Christianson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Most of Mark Twain’s novels, full of sharp wit and relevant social commentary, suggest his strong ability to read people and create characters that endure through decades, while still concealing his own opinion on society beneath layers of sardonic criticism or feigned admiration. But A Horse’s Tale—an odd little novel about an orphan girl, her favorite horse named Soldier Boy (a gift from Buffalo Bill), and the bloody murder of both at the horns of a tortured bull—does not fit Twain’s typical formula. At first glance, this novel is full of earnest superlatives rendered trite, an uneven narrative arc, …