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From Building a First-Generation Digital Library Infrastructure to Reimagining Discovery
No full textTwenty-five years ago, Harvard University was in the early stages of a project to build a first-generation digital library infrastructure. The project was carefully named the Library Digital Initiative (LDI), signifying that ‘digital’ would be an integral and integrated aspect of ‘library’ and not a separate entity. The initiative aimed to develop knowledge and expertise relating to digital objects, as well as technical infrastructure to create, curate, access and preserve them, and to integrate the new digital collections with Harvard’s extensive tangible collections.
Today, we still benefit from the foresight of this first-generation development and the subsequent ones it spawned, but we are also at a pivotal point of reflecting on lessons learned and opportunities to be seized as we rebuild and reimagine our digital infrastructure and services in a vastly expanded data ecosystem. Predicting what libraries will look like two decades ahead is always conjecture. What we do know, however, is that while the themes and challenges from the past two decades endure, the way we are tackling them is different. This paper examines what has changed since early library digital initiatives, and the imperatives we see for the future.Version of Recor
Lost Souls: Outsider Myths in the Works of Olga Tokarczuk
No full textThe works of Olga Tokarczuk have garnered significant attention since she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018. Her narrative style engages with complex historical and contemporary issues, often confronting Polish cultural myths in the process. These myths have historically ostracized or oppressed whole groups of Poles, namely women, ethnic minorities, and religious minorities, creating a demographic category referred to in this thesis as outsiders. With the collapse of the Soviet Union leading to the political and cultural sovereignty of the Republic of Poland, these myths re-emerged. This paper posits that Tokarczuk challenges three outsider myths consistently throughout her body of literature: the Polish Mother, Catholic Hegemony, and the Great Past. She argues that these myths are neither historically faithful nor contemporarily tenable. Instead, she puts forth her own myth of Inclusion to supplant Polish outsider myths
Elizabeth Blackwell: First Female MD and Extraordinary Personality in American Medicine
No full textAuthor's Origina
Hemp-Town
No full textHemp-Town, located in Ji Xi, China, is a speculative urban design project that positions hemp as the primary economic species, valued for its low environmental impact, high adaptability, and material versatility. This thesis reimagines sustainability within the design discipline through three methods: morphology, analogy/biology, and typology/topography.
Mapping oblique visualizes the economic paradigms of the hemp-based town using a color-coded system—orange, green, and purple—embedded in line drawings. Diagraming hemp translates hemp’s fractal growth pattern into a generative logic for urban transportation planning and redistribution design.Massing Ji Xi adopts Chinese characters into the architectural massing design as a formal generator.
The thesis critiques estate-based production city models and symbolic urbanism approaches. Rather, hemp directs the design process as both design tool and design object. Through this lens, Hemp-Town offers an integrated framework for rethinking landscape, architecture, and city-making.Department of Landscape Architectur
Coordination Under Constraints: A Wireless Signal-Based Framework for Failure-Aware Multi-Robot Exploration
No full textThis thesis presents the WSR Framework, a decentralized framework for multi-robot exploration in environments with limited communication and no shared global map. The system enables teams of robots to coordinate using only onboard sensing and lightweight relative position estimates derived from wireless signal exchanges from WiFi and UWB sensors. Each robot selects exploration targets independently, guided by a utility function that accounts for local information gain and inferred teammate positions. A key contribution is a confidence-based failure detection mechanism that allows each robot to respond to teammate failures using only motion history. The confidence value adjusts how exploration targets are selected, which helps to redistribute coverage progress. The full system is validated through both simulation and hardware experiments. The results show significant reductions in robot overlap compared to zero-coordination baselines, and performance that approaches that of centralized strategies, without requiring explicit communication or shared maps.Computer Scienc
Quantum Black Holes and the Primordial Universe
No full textTwo central challenges of twenty-first century physics are to understand the quantum nature of regions of spacetime with strong curvature, such as black holes, and to uncover the composition and physical laws of the universe's dark sector, especially during the primordial era. This dissertation presents new theoretical results and experimental tools aimed at advancing our understanding of these fundamental problems.
When quantum field theory is combined with classical black hole models, it predicts that black holes emit radiation and lose mass over time, potentially evaporating completely. However, there are unresolved questions about the origin of this radiation and its behavior near the event horizon. I present the most detailed numerical study to date of the quantum state near the horizon of a semi-classical Schwarzschild black hole, helping resolve conflicting ideas from previous research and offering new insights into the local temperature near the horizon.
There are currently no observational data on evaporating black holes, or even any direct evidence that they evaporate at all. I explore the prospects of detecting warm, dark-sector relic particles emitted from evaporating primordial black holes through their impact on the large-scale structure of the universe. I show that these relics can be detected by current and future cosmological surveys and can be distinguished from thermally-produced relics. Additionally, I provide the strongest constraints on these relics to date, demonstrating that they can account for no more than about 2% of the dark matter across a broad region of their viable parameter space.
Exploring the dark-sector of the universe and its primordial state requires reconstructing its early-time conditions from present-day observations. I present a novel method for reconstructing the initial matter density field from the late-time density field using convolutional neural networks. This method expands the range of high-fidelity reconstruction to much smaller scales than existing techniques, showing promise for exploring the properties of the primordial universe at smaller scales than ever before.Astronom