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SINGING THROUGH THE PANDEMIC: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF MUSICAL DEVELOPMENT AND SURVIVAL
No full textIn this thesis, I write, produce, and record three songs with lyrics based on deeply emotional experiences that occurred during the pandemic. In the accompanying paper I contrast my work with that of Bo Burnham’s musical special about the pandemic. I also talk in depth about my own music writing process, inspiration, and development. I hope that readers and listeners of this thesis find it to be a genuine and sincere expression of difficult events, and something that they can return to for comfort in their own moments of personal hardship
“THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE:” EXPLORING CONTEMPORARY DEPICTIONS OF MOTHERHOOD IN LITERATURE
No full textThis thesis focuses on exploring depictions of motherhood in popular twentieth and twenty-first century literature. I use shifting trends in maternal literature as a means of identifying women’s shifting anxieties and frustrations around motherhood, specifically through the lens of the traditional nuclear family structure. In Chapter 1, I analyze the cultural mythology of the Virgin Mary, in conjunction with Shin Kyung-sook’s novel Please Look After Mom. The aim of this chapter is to create an understanding of what it takes to be considered a “good mother,” and the limitations of the sociocultural vision of the perfect mother. In Chapter 2, I explore various depictions of “bad moms,” traveling from the literature of the early twentieth century to the present day. Throughout, I maintain a sharp focus on how we can use this literature to not only bear witness to women’s struggles, but to generate new female-centric approaches to mothering and domestic labor
VOTER PARTICIPATION, RESTRICTIVE VOTER LAWS, AND REPUBLICAN LEGISLATURES: A STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF BLACK TURNOUT ON THE PROPOSAL AND PASSAGE OF RESTRICTIVE VOTING LEGISLATION
No full textSeveral state legislatures responded to the 2020 election’s record turnout by proposing and passing record numbers of restrictions on voting. This study considers whether higher turnout rates from Black voters influences the proposal and passage of restrictive voting legislation. I hypothesize that, in Republican-controlled legislatures, Black turnout will increase both the number of proposed restrictive bills in a state and the likelihood a legislature passes a restrictive bill due to the overwhelmingly Democratic voting patterns of Black voters, with a further expectation that this effect will be clearest in Republican states that are electorally competitive. Using data from 34 states in the 2020 election, I run several regression models to test my hypotheses. Ultimately, I find little support for my hypotheses. If any relationship exists between Black turnout and restrictive laws, higher turnout from Black voters decreases the likelihood that a restrictive bill passes. There are mixed indications about how competitiveness might influence restrictive voting laws, but no indication that Black turnout’s effects will be altered based on competitiveness. Republican control of a state presents a regularly substantive effect on restrictive laws. These results cannot be easily generalized beyond these 34 states, so future study on this topic is important
Lorelei
No full textOval shaped mural featuring nine human-like figures against a primarily blue and purple background of ocean waves and a cloud filled sky with a bright star in the middle. The scene is surrounded by a painted frame which has vegetal and shell motifs. The largest figure is a woman painted in the same colors as the background, she plays the flute. Two smaller blue female figures dance in between two waves at the center of the mural. Four babies with mermaid tails swim around at the bottom of the mural and two women in bikinis appear to walk into the waves, one standing on the painted frame of the work.https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/pubart/1104/thumbnail.jp
On Site/ Sight Mural; Emma Curtis
No full textMural featuring six Sandhill Cranes flying towards the right, each getting smaller as they move farther from the left. They are set against a sky of fluffy clouds at sunset. The cranes are grey with a bit of red on their heads, the sky is a gradient of pastel orange, pink and blue.https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/pubart/1105/thumbnail.jp
COWORK: GAMIFIED, VIRTUAL COWORKING WITH FOCUS ON ACCESSIBILITY
No full textCoworking spaces can allow students focused on different tasks to work in the same environment, support productivity and self-efficacy, and can promote social interactions and peer support. These spaces, physically, can include coffee shops, libraries, dedicated coworking spaces, and other locations. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of these spaces have been shuttered to potential visitors or are simply unsafe. Extended periods of online learning during COVID-19 have led to social isolation and decreased productivity and motivation among students. Some online applications begin to address the void left by the closure of these physical spaces, but all of them suffer from a lack of real- time interaction, a lack of productivity tools or focus, major accessibility issues, or a combination of the aforementioned. Cowork (source code: https://github.com/innkeeper- games/cowork) is a new interactive system that supports online coworking for students in a comfortable, virtual environment, built with accessibility features like keyboard- navigation and screen-reader support
I MUST BE BURNED ALIVE: PERFORMANCE, QUEERNESS, AND MARTYRDOM THROUGH THE LENS OF ST SEBASTIAN
No full textSaint Sebastian has become a somewhat well-known symbol of queerness and homoeroticism, largely due to a pattern emerging within renaissance art that depicts him as scantily clad and in varying states of ecstasy at the moment of his initial martyrdom. This installation takes this somewhat surface-level association and draws personal parallels between the hagiography of Sebastian and a lived experience as a queer person living in the United States, using self-portraiture and poetry to encourage the viewer to interact with the piece and to draw these connections themselves. This work takes several artistic interpretations of the same story and seeks to work against the dehumanizing process of becoming a symbol, be it that of the saint or that of the caricature, and create a unique, intentional, and personal connection with the viewer
AUTOMATED MODERNIZATION OF SHAKESPEAREAN ENGLISH: USING NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TO CAPTURE WRITING STYLE
No full textThis thesis explores the field of Text Style Transfer using Natural Language Process- ing techniques. This task falls into the larger topic of Text Attribute Transfer, a field also encompassing closely-related tasks such as Machine Translation and Paraphrase Generation. Where style transfer differs from these existing tasks is that it focuses on trying to capture the more fine-grained aspects of writing such as diction and semantic syntax. The goal of this thesis is to explore some of the fundamental topics in Natu- ral Language Processing necessary for the understanding of Attribute Transfer tasks. These topics include text normalization techniques, tokenization and word embedding techniques such as Word2Vec and FastText, and a beginning discussion of Machine Translation using Sequence-to-Sequence modelling with an attention mechanism. Fol- lowing this, this paper will briefly discuss modern techniques for monolingual-corpus Style Transfer such as Style-Content Disentanglement and Pseudo-parallel Corpus Construction. We will attempt to apply techniques for parallel-corpus Style Trans- fer to a dataset of Shakespearean texts rewritten in Modern English. Metrics for evaluating the success of these modeling techniques will also be discussed, with a demonstration being performed on the outcome of our parallel-corpus experiment and a discussion on some of the shortcomings with existing evaluation metrics
RACIAL INEQUALITY: AN ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH
No full textI provide evidence that there is racial inequality in the criminal justice system, and that our criminal justice system is flawed. I look at the effects of the incarceration rates among different races, and how this has a domino effect into other aspects of the Black community. I look at how this affects mental health, segregation, and employment in Black communities. I look at why our criminal justice system is flawed through a John Rawlisan approach through his principles of justice, and Charles Mills\u27 criticism of John Rawls, as well as Tommie Shelby. I look at policies in which we can combat this, and I hypothesize the best way to do so is through crime prevention policies. I also provide other policies such as life after incarceration
The Tampa Bay Puerto Rican Community: Expanding Contemporary Research on Puerto Rican Migrant Communities in Florida
No full textThis research covers the migratory history and characteristics of Puerto Ricans in Tampa and their relations with other Latines. I seek to expand the study of contemporary Puerto Rican communities in Florida that has been concentrated in Orlando and understand the effect of the histories and communities of the cities Puerto Rican migrants settle in on their sense of self and relations with other Latines. Following methods of previous studies, I conducted surveys and interviews with active community members. I found that Tampa Puerto Ricans are very similar to Orlando’s community in motives for migration but vary in racial self-identification and appear to have less strained relationships with other Latine ethnicities, though this has not necessarily translated to pan-Latine political action. These preliminary findings are important for setting up further research dedicated to the Tampa Bay Puerto Rican community and documenting how different histories and environments can shape community-building for Puerto Rican migrant communities