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Five considerations for engaging with Big Data from a rhetorical-humanistic perspective
Full text linkThis essay offers five conceptual entry points for engaging with Big Data from a rhetorical perspective. These five concepts—data in/as relationships, observability/action, patterns, diachronicity, and audience—serve as points of deep conceptual commonality between definitions of Big Data and principles in rhetorical studies, and are offered here as considerations for critiquing uses of Big Data from a rhetorical-humanistic perspective, as well as for guiding rhetorical work that uses Big Data
Rhetorical Implications of Contact Tracing Mobile Applications: An Examination of Big Data’s Work on the Body
Full text linkFor nearly a decade, big data has been hyped as an amazing new technology that will benefit corporations and consumers alike. By promising customized knowledge at an accelerated pace, big data technologies have slowly saturated the digital systems American consumers use to live, work, and play. Yet have the promised benefits materialized? An examination of the proposed contact tracing applications in response to the novel coronavirus alongside existing wearable technologies reveal that our trust and vulnerability, opening our bodies to be sensed by these networked systems, is a fraught rhetorical activity: not because an omniscient system now sees us and cares for us in our time of grave need. Rather, the opaque system misunderstands our embodied rhetorical actions, is incapable of moving the American polis, and cannot generate the promised collective action
The Life and Patronage of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge: Exploring Developments in Cultural Philanthropy with the Institutionalization of American Classical Music
Full text linkThe decades around the turn of the twentieth century presented a sudden growth in American musical life and more specifically, classical music. My thesis explores how this crucial and formative moment coincided with the rise of cultural philanthropy in the United States. As musical life was becoming institutionalized, individualist cultural philanthropists such as Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge created and supported these opportunities in innovative and unconventional ways. By examining the case study of Coolidge, this thesis explores how the institutionalization of classical music in twentieth-century America connects to new ideas about the role of patrons in artistic life and society in general. Her Berkshire Quartet and chamber music festivals, relationship with Carl Engel and the Library of Congress, utilization of the radio, and influence on academia provide insight into other methods of individualist patronage. Additionally, this thesis considers how this period saw other women engage in patronage and music sponsorship, further contributing to the institutions of American cultural and musical life
Peace by Coercion? How UN Sanctions Impact the Occurrence of Peace Negotiations in Civil Wars
Full text linkPrevious studies have employed the bargaining model of war to explain likelihood of negotiation in intrastate conflict. Building upon this framework, this article provides an analysis of the effect of targeted UN sanctions on the onset of negotiations between warring parties in civil wars. Using novel monthly negotiation data and UN targeted sanction data from thirteen African civil wars between 1989 and 2020, my analysis finds that when sanctions target governments, negotiation onset is more likely. These findings contribute to the limited research on the effect of targeted sanctions on intrastate conflict and have important implications for policy-makers using sanctions as a tool of conflict resolution
Universalizing Adaptive Preferences
Full text linkThis honors thesis attempts to reconcile adaptive preferences (APs) with the autonomy of the oppressed. I thus investigate APs closely, a term used in the feminist philosophical literature to communicate a distinct feature of marginalized and oppressed people–the undue influence of systems of oppression on their preferences, decisions, and overall autonomy. I have aimed to situate this concept within a broader discussion of autonomy theory to get at the heart of this project: constructing an account that universalizes APs, one that asserts it as a phenomenon affecting people of all social locations. To better illustrate social positioning, I assert that all people are variously situated within any given dominant social imaginary; in this way, our agentive capacities are inherently tied to that social imaginary. My account thus puts forth necessary normative questioning to alleviate failures by theories to appropriately understand the oppressed person’s actions, preferences, and even compliance with oppressive norms. Simultaneously challenging the current application of APs, while also acknowledging the concept’s marked influence on the field of feminist ethics and autonomy theory, my account makes room for identities which shift, an intersectional perspective, a critique of the privileged who by way of their social locations often help maintain oppressive structures, and social resistance. The final portion of this project looks at competing accounts to answer a question of resistance and outlines specific examples of adaptive preferences held by the privileged person that one might learn to resist
The impact of adding fetal MRI to sonographically diagnosed intrauterine ventriculomegaly: a prospective cohort study
Full text linkObjective: Intrauterine fetal ventriculomegaly (IVM) is one of the most commonly detected fetal anomalies. Prenatal diagnosis in IVM is considered a challenge with a significant impact on management. The current study aims to evaluate the added value of performing fetal MRI to sonographically diagnosed IVM.
Methods: A prospective cohort study was conducted at a tertiary University Hospital in the period between January 2017 and March 2019. We included pregnant women with a single fetus sonographically diagnosed IVM (symmetrical or asymmetrical). First, a basic obstetric sonographic examination was done, followed by a detailed (2D/3D) fetal CNS anomaly scan for the detection of other associated anomalies. A fetal MRI brain scan was performed for all cases.
Results: Sixty women were included in the study. Of the 60 fetuses with IVM, additional findings were seen on MRI in 14 cases (23%), and most of these findings were identified in fetuses with severe IVM (about 50%). No additional abnormalities were identified in fetuses of less than 24 weeks gestation. Callosal and septum pellucidum lesions (29%), along with posterior fossa abnormalities (28%) and cortical malformations (21%) accounted for the most common additional significant fetal MRI findings. Fetal MRI sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values in correlation with those of prenatal ultrasound turned out to be notably higher, approaching nearly 100 %.
Conclusions: Fetal MRI for sonographically diagnosed moderate or severe IVM is recommended to guide clinical management
Discovering Constance: Reconstructing the Life of the Illegitimate Daughter of John Paston II
No full textThe Paston Letters contain one letter from Constance Reynyforth, the mistress of Sir John Paston, and one reference to her ‘bastard’ daughter, Constance Paston. The subsequent life of Constance Paston has, until now, remained obscure. My research, which outlines these discoveries for the first time, reveals that, not only was she acknowledged and cared for by the Pastons, but she also married into a local gentry family, had children, and lived a normal lifespan
Walt Whitman in the Yugoslav Interwar Periodicals: Serbo-Croatian Reception, 1918–1940
Full text linkInsistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics of Patient Griselda
No full textThis essay argues for silence as a dynamic actant and vibrant rhetoric. While Walter commits slow violence against her, Griselda in Chaucer\u27s Clerk\u27s Tale resists the predatory practice of exploiting nonhuman objects, which, within misogyny, women embody. Ultimately framed within an ecocritical paradigm, this essay is grounded in lessons from trauma studies concerning silence, as well as new materialist and ecocritical approaches. Whether focusing on emotional distress, environmental devastation, or the agency of materiality, these critical approaches cohere by making manifest and heard what has been repressed, silenced, or overlooked. Griselda writes her own narrative, patiently and resiliently enacting agency through her poetics of negation