IDA Mount Holyoke College Institutional Digital Archive
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Power and Potential: The Role of Language in State- and Nation- Building
No full textThis research addresses the questions, how, why, and when does language become a catalyst for intrastate conflict? I approach language not simply as one dimension of complex ethnic conflicts, but as a specific catalyst for those conflicts themselves. My research tells the stories of two states, Cameroon and Sri Lanka, in which language became central to fights for autonomy and secession. In each of these cases, language need not have become a contested issue but was constructed as such due to political choices by state actors. This thesis specifically isolates language as an aspect of ethnic identity apt to be a driving force of identity-based mobilization due to its unique role in both fomenting nation and facilitating state.
I trace the outbreak of conflict in these two case studies – Sri Lanka and Cameroon – to locate critical junctures in which language became an activated grievance. I find that it is specific moments of political exclusion which serve as a catalyst for linguistic conflict. I root my analysis in the claim that language difference is not inherently a precondition to conflict, but becomes a potential grievance when language is used to mediate power and resources. I find that in both Sri Lanka and Cameroon, colonization played a large role in creating the language policy and state structures which breed linguistic conflict. I conclude by proposing a framework on the development of linguistic conflict which offers lessons on the outbreak of conflict on an axis of language difference.Politic
Characterizing Volcanic and Impact Materials in Lunar Craters
No full textImpact craters on the Moon are typically infilled by either impact or volcanic melt, but outside of a few previously known characteristics, identification can be complicated. Morphological and compositional characteristics are the best options for definitive differentiation between volcanic and impact in impact craters. In this paper the history of lunar morphological research is reviewed and eight craters >60km in diameter are mapped to create a comprehensive list of features of note using the maps available through JMARS. Over the past 50 years, interest in lunar morphology has been primarily impacted by the technology available. Without high definition views of the lunar surface, studies on the Moon’s craters focused on size and volume instead of internal components. As technology improved, the study of lunar craters expanded. This thesis shows that many features of note in impact melt-filled impact craters exist primarily on
the crater floor. That floor has been obscured in volcanically-filled impact craters. Impact
melt-filled impact craters also maintain the same albedo and composition as the
surrounding terrain, while volcanically-filled impact craters are of a darker albedo and
mafic composition. The existence of terraced rims is affected by age rather than interior
fill composition, unless the interior melt has obscured any terraces. Crater rims slump
with age and therefore cannot indicate alone the type of melt inside the crater.Astronom
A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market
No full textEconomists use Gross Domestic Product as a marker of the growth and success of a country but fail to consider that the people who constitute an economy are more than just machines built for labor. What is the meaning of success? What does a successful economy look like? How does one determine if an economy is progressing or regressing? Guided by the perspectives of German economist Wilhelm Ropke, this thesis describes the possible structure and mechanisms of a flourishing economy.
In the early 20th century, Ropke published books arguing for alternatives to both nazism and communism and dissected topics of morality and cultural decline. In his humanitarian approach to describing an ideal economy, he advocates for the spiritual elements of Christianity and rejects the outcomes of societies built on the foundations of socialism, collectivism, totalitarianism, and mass society. This thesis focuses on his works and the ideologies he preaches in A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market. With the intention of applying a contemporary context to Ropke’s work, I gained insight into his motivations and ideas just prior to A Humane Economy and investigated the public response to determine if his beliefs could be implemented in today’s society. This thesis attempts to decipher the layers of complexity in his idealized economic market and further extrapolate which elements, if any, can be considered in a current application of his ideas.Economic
Contested Healing: Experiments in Graphic Ethnography of Ankylosing Spondylitis
No full textThrough graphic ethnography, I analyze and represent the way individuals experience, feel, and embody the unique temporality and liminality of Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS) as a chronic, degenerative condition. To do so, I draw on my research of individuals with AS in online public spaces and nine long-form, semi-structured interviews. This work, in all its components, addresses overarching conversations about chronic illness and people’s use of holistic treatments in the face of the biomedical push for pharmaceuticals. AS is a chronic inflammatory autoimmune disease marked by inflammation of the sacroiliac joints, spine, ribs, and eyes, and vertebrae fusion. It often presents in adolescence and throughout early adulthood and manifests in periods of pain and periods of remission. I use digitally-produced graphics to de-center and complicate the overwhelming hold of biomedicine’s normative narratives of the “best” and “correct” modes of treatment and care, evoking an affective response to narratives of AS and experiences of chronic illness embodiment. As a generative form of analysis and representation, graphic ethnography allows me to unearth the way people’s engagements and investments in holistic healing generate newfound control, agency, and power that biomedicine otherwise strips from them in light of an AS diagnosis.Gender Studie
Natural Language Processing and Spanglish: Approaches towards Part-of-Speech Tagging Code-Switched Text
No full textNatural language processing (NLP) is a field dedicated to the computational understanding of human language. Through computational analysis of human text and speech, the field has made incredible strides and created tools that many people use on a day-to-day basis such as Siri and Google Translate. At the core of these incredibly powerful systems are a number of common NLP tasks that are key to a system’s ability to process language. One of these tasks is part of speech (POS) tagging, which involves assigning parts of speech to each word in an input text.
Although NLP has been a heavily researched subfield of computing since the 1950s, to date the vast majority of analysis in the field has focused on a small number of monolingual world languages with large amounts of data available and many systems designed for their analysis, which are commonly referred to as high-resource languages. While there has been significant research into multilingual text and speech, this research has historically not included code-switched language. Code switching, sometimes referred to as code mixing, is when multilingual speakers alternate between two or more languages or dialects within a single conversation or utterance. Despite the fact that code-switching is nearly universal within multilingual communities, the vast majority of NLP tools and products are optimized for monolingual input, ignoring the natural speech and/or writing patterns of many people and communities throughout the world. POS tagging research, specifically, has yielded many different models and methods to tag monolingual data, but much less work has been done to POS tag code-switched language.
This thesis takes one of these monolingual models, the Stanford Part of Speech Tagger, and analyzes different approaches through which its performance can be greatly improved for Spanglish (code-switched Spanish and English) input. Specifically, two models are developed and analyzed: 1) a multi-lingual approach that integrates separate monolingual models for the matrix and secondary languages (the language splitting model) and 2) a translation model where the code-switched language is translated before tagging (the translation model). Both models performed at a lower accuracy than the baseline for monolingual input, but greatly improved upon the baselines for tagging the code-switched data and achieved results on par with previous studies which have developed and trained POS taggers specifically for code-switched language.Computer Scienc
Teachers not Preachers: Teaching U.S. History amid Civic Divisions
No full textThis study analyzes 20 long-form interviews with public high school history teachers to explore how they teach about anti-Black racism, slavery, and racial inequality amid public contention. Previous research on how teachers respond to curricular challenges shows that educators bend little to the concerns of outsiders. This is borne out in the current research which finds that U.S. history teachers have a shared identity that informs a focus on learning goals for students and the logistical constraints of teaching in public schools. There is evidence of regional divisions between history teachers in northern and southern states, but there are also crosscutting complexities that complicate these divisions. In fact, across a range of differences such as urban rural location and the racial and ethnic composition of schools, teachers bend as little as possible to conservative critics. When we include teachers’ voices in current debates about U.S. history, we discover a vast divide between the practical, on-the-ground concerns of teachers and the ideological concerns which non-educators espouse. The interviewed teachers try to operate above the political fray. This is important because U.S. history teachers collectively have agency and can shape historical discourse and national knowledge.Sociology & Anthropolog
The Industrial Revolution: Changing Art and the Economy in Nineteenth Century France
No full textThe industrial revolution marked the beginning of modern society. It allowed for more efficiency in production, greater output, and general economic growth. But industrialization affected a number of industries, and among them was the art industry. Artists benefited from mass production with the invention of portable paint tubes, which allowed them to take their craft outside of their studio, and ultimately provided the opportunity for artists to depict different subject matters in their work–a departure from the neoclassical style. Given the timing of the evolution of art supplies and the shift in artistic subject matter, I wondered whether the economic effects of France’s industrial revolution were able to influence art. In order to understand how depicted subject matter changed, I turned to the Paris Salon catalogs that recorded the artwork exhibited throughout 19th century Paris. I digitized the 1865 Paris Salon catalog and compiled it with categorizations made by Jon Whiteley and digitized by Diana Greenwald. I recorded the artist’s name, gender, and birthplace, along with their Salon entry number, the title of the painting, and who the artist apprenticed to, if applicable. From there I divided the artists by birthplace into two groups: Parisians and non-Parisians, to determine if artists born in Paris, who were exposed to more urbanization and modernity, chose to paint more urban or rural scenes in art. This project takes an economic approach to examine how industrialization influenced art. More specifically, I focus on the question of how the subject matter being depicted in the 1865 Paris Salon exhibition was impacted by the industrial revolution. Were Parisian artists able to paint more rural or urban scenes? Is it possible industrialization influenced the scenes painters depict? My argument is deeply rooted in economic history, the art history data I have collected, and the intersection between the two. The interdisciplinary work has been a phenomenal exploration of combining quantitative and creative disciplines to determine how the art world hinges on the economy and its developments.Economic
Using Simulations to Probe the Interfacial Disorder of Organic Solar Cells
No full textSolar cell technology is constantly evolving, pushing the limits of efficiency while working to conserve costs. Organic solar cells are promisingly inexpensive to make but are much more disordered than conventional materials, making them much less efficient. This disorder, which takes the form of traps, greatly influences the behavior of the carriers but is not fully understood. Understanding all the intricacies of this disorder would enable us to build more efficient devices. In a heterojunction organic photovoltaic device, the trap properties of the interface between the donor and acceptor materials can significantly impact the device efficiency but it is still unclear exactly how. We hypothesized that the trap properties of this interface impact the performance of the device more than the bulk properties and that there is more disorder in the interface than the bulk. We investigated our hypotheses using drift-diffusion simulations and found that while the interface does have more of an impact on the device than the bulk it is difficult to conclude if there is more disorder in the interface than the bulk.Physic
Simulation Study of Markov Chain Composite Likelihood and its Application in Recombination Model
No full textDNA sequencing technologies are rapidly advancing, allowing researchers access to data which is both high quality and highly detailed. In particular, these technologies are able to record the allele found at single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sites on individual haplotypes. A central goal for SNP data is SNP mapping, which would facilitate advancements in genetics, including hierarchical trees that enrich our understanding of human evolutionary history. Though geneticists have detailed SNP data on extant humans, this is not the
case for previous generations, necessitating estimation backward in time. There is a need for statistical methods that perform this estimation. The statistical question is: If we observe n current descendant binary sequences with length L, how can we estimate the unknown ancestor distribution while considering biological complexities? Recombination, a biological complexity involving an exchange of genetic material between chromosomes, can give descendants haplotypes which don’t match ancestral chromosomes. Sun (2011) proposed
a Recombination Model which estimates the unknown ancestral distribution while considering a fixed probability of recombination. Markov chain composite likelihood (MCCL) is used to obtain estimates of the population frequency with which the ancestor will have a given binary sequence. Under the assumption that both ancestor and descendant sequences follow an order-m Markov Chain structure, hierarchical estimation is used to estimate the joint distribution from marginal estimates. Here, we run simulations for this estimator and focus on the use of MCCL and selection of fixed quantities. Our data-generating mechanism will be done via resampling using data from the International HapMap Project, allowing sample proportions to simulate a true ancestor distribution. Performance measures will include bias and standard error of both joint and marginal estimates, bootstrapped confidence intervals, and total density correctly assigned to true non-zero probability sequences. Marginal distribution results show that the method provides estimates with low bias and standard error, but show evidence of a directional effect of the use of MCCL such that both bias and standard error increase for sites further from the start of the chain. Joint distribution results show a trade-off between bias and standard error; increasing m decreases the bias but increases the standard error. The joint density sums show that nearly all of the density is assigned to either true non-zero sequences or sequences which are 85 % similar. Finally, to make this methodology accessible, an R package recombinationMCCL is currently under development with a preliminary version available on Github.Mathematics & Statistic
The Silenced Voices
No full textThis study focuses on the experiences of young queer survivors of sexual violence between the ages of 18-25 years from India. The goal of this thesis is to understand the barriers to support and care that the population under study experience in the aftermath of sexual violence. The current study also focuses on the intersections of multiple marginalised identities, including but not limited to being survivors of sexual violence, queer, religion and/or caste based minorities, and gender minorities. Past literature in the field has shown the intersections of religion and caste based violence with sexual violence in the Indian context. It has also shown the intersections of sexual violence and queer identity in a non-Indian (US- based) context. It is the goal of this research to bridge this crucial gap in existing literature, specifically the absence of research on the experiences of queer survivors of sexual violence in the Indian context. The aim of this research is to amplify the voices of those who are silent, and have been silenced, in both academia and the popular imaginary. The results of this study will have profound implications, and can be used as the basis upon which interventions that are rooted in the lived experiences of a diverse population can be built.Psychology & Educatio