Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Advancing The Spatial Turn In History Through Deep Mapping: Ghost Maps, Neogeography, And Frederick Jackson Turner, Jessica L. Mathai

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The permeation of the spatial turn into the humanities, and in particular history, has both imbued scholarship and opened up new areas for research. This dissertation examines the conceptual and theoretical implications of advancing the spatial turn in history and evaluating existing approaches such as Historical GIS and ghost mapping as a foundation for deep mapping. The resulting deep map developed in this study utilizes Neogeography and web technology in the form of JavaScript Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to develop a prototype that overcomes many of the limitations that occur when simultaneously integrating multiple sources of data and software functionality, …

'Making It' Through Migration: Success (Im)Mobility And 'Development' In The Gambia, Martin J. Aucoin

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Contemporary scholarly and journalistic literature consistently represents migration from and through The Gambia using the lens of “crisis”. While these representations normally focus on Gambian migration to European states – a movement that is highly politicized – this thesis presents a case study of Gambian migration to a less-politicized destination, North America, in order to explore the relationship between lived experiences and representations of migration absent the discourse of crisis that pervades other scholarly and journalistic works. Drawing on the mobilities paradigm, feminist geographies of migration, critical race theory, transnationalism, and literatures on bordering, humanitarianism and development, I examine, through …

Climate Science Literacy: A Study Of Climate Programs' Usability, Amber Rochelle Williams

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Literacy is an important facet of understanding how undergraduate college students comprehend climate science. This research, conducted at West Virginia University, examines the usability of climate data in three commonly used climate programs to reduce the prominent knowledge gap in climate science literacy about college students.

The objective of this research is to investigate the knowledge gap in climate science literacy by conducting focus group surveys to examine the usability of programs that use climate datasets. The three programs used in this research were the NOAA online tool, NASA’s Panoply data viewer, and GrADS programmable tool. The NOAA tool is …