by Steven N. Jones. / Bibliography: p. leaf 19. / Also available on microfiche. AFOSR Grant 77-3281. / Microfiche copy available in Barker.

Late night talk shows have been an integral part of U.S. television since the 1950s, and the genre continues to thrive today in an ever changing media landscape. In my dissertation, I argue that the contemporary programs of Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! make up a category of late night talk shows that I term as satirical network late night. From a visual standpoint, these programs look almost identical to past programs like The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson or the Late Show with David Letterman with their sets, house bands, monologues, sketches, desk pieces, and guest appearances. However, these satirical network late night programs produce political content that differs vastly from their predecessors. I assert that these programs are steeped in brazen partisanship, amplify the news media, and function as a sensationalized form of infotainment. This is not the big-tent and “least objectionable programming” offered on past network programs like Carson’s Tonight Show. Additionally, this is not what was offered on cable parody news programs such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that presented a veiled partisanship, served as a watchdog over the media and political spheres, and lambasted the entertainment-laden modes of modern news reporting and punditry. In less than a decade, satirical network late night has disrupted genre conventions that existed on network television for over sixty years. This research breaks down what makes these new satirical network late night programs’ political content distinct and helps to decipher why these changes took place in mid-2010s.

The large cache of scrolls from Herculaneum were opened to scholars in spite of and because of the destruction of the volcano and damaging unfurling techniques. The fragments inherited have been studied closely by scholars. Digitization and technological work on the Herculaneum papyri, including the important infrared imaging completed by BYU in the early 2000s, and the 3-D imaging and inchoate virtual unwrapping technology by EduceLab, have amplified and aided scholarship on the scrolls and will continue to do so. P.Herc. 817 is a unique Latin text within the collection that has been heavily studied by scholars due to its fascinating subject matter on the Battle of Actium and Cleopatra and its readability. This fragment serves as a case study to demonstrate the value of each set of digital images in transcription and interpretation research, which suggests at the value of the varying digital images for other Herculaneum fragments. I closely compare digital surrogates of P.Herc. 817 including the early 2000s infrared images, 1960's era negatives, and recent 3-D images with the original artifacts as seen at the Biblioteca Nazionale in July 2023. This autopsy of versions of P.Herc. 817 substantiates the need for scholars to use all available digital images in concert with the original papyri when doing scholarly work. It also reinforces the need for digital stewardship and preservation of each distinct image set. Finally, a hypothetical case study is offered to show the loss to scholarship if the digital images and originals were lost and solely secondary sources remained. Each image set offers value and captures a moment in time of the papyri. As technology continues to progress and excitingly unlocks unseen papyri, care needs to be taken to safeguard and digitally preserve the new along with the older data sets.