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Scholars have repeatedly contrasted the 1805 and 1850 versions of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude since the discovery and publication of the former by Ernest De Sélincourt in 1926. Points of contention have included the 1850 poem’s grammatical revisions and shifts toward greater political and religious orthodoxy. While these discussions have waned in recent decades, digital humanities tools allow us to revisit oft-debated texts through new lenses. Wanting to examine scholarly claims about The Prelude from a digital humanities perspective, I collaborated with Dr. Billy Hall to enter both versions of the poem into a data analysis and visualization tool, which displayed the results in topic-modeling outputs and most-frequent-words lists. The 1805 and 1850 topic modeling outputs were essentially identical to one another, suggesting either that scholars have overstated differences between the versions or that the themes of the poem may have evolved in ways not easily captured by my digital humanities methods. On the other hand, the most-frequent-words lists revealed some notable discrepancies between the two Preludes. One set of lists included articles, conjunctions, pronouns, and linking verbs (otherwise known as “stop words”), demonstrating, for instance, that the word “was” appeared with significantly less frequency in the 1850 Prelude. I found that other linking verbs also decreased in the 1850 Prelude, and this discovery prompted me to conduct a stylistic analysis of said verbs. Knowing that a raw statistical count of linking verbs in both texts would reveal only an incomplete portrait of Wordsworth’s shifting verb usage, I divided the verb revisions into two primary categories: replacements of linking verbs with dynamic verbs and descriptors, and removals of lines containing linking verbs. While scholars have previously highlighted the replacement of linking verbs with dynamic verbs and descriptors in the 1850 Prelude, these revisions only account for 30% of the 1850 linking verb revisions. In fact, the majority of linking verb revisions consist of removed 1805 lines. Many of these lines are declarative statements—the removal of which suggests that Wordsworth preferred, in some cases, a less prescriptive approach in the 1850 Prelude.

In order to facilitate the automated extraction of complex features and structures within narrative, namely plot in this study, two proof-of-concept methods of narrative visualization are presented with the goal of representing the plot of the narrative. Plot is defined to give a basis for quality assessment and comparison. The first visualization presented is a scatter-plot of entities within the story, but due to failing to uphold the definition of plot, in-depth analysis is not performed. The second visualization presented is a graph structure that better represents a mapping of the plot of the story. Narrative structures commonly found within the plot maps are shown and discussed, and comparisons with ground-truth plot maps are made, showing that this method of visualization represents the plot and narrative flow of the stories.

Embedded in the quilt top, the fabric patches are relays, time pathways to stories and memories of their former owners. Through the quilts, the voices of the past survive. The stories trace a path of connection between oral traditions, storytelling, the invention of meaning, and the preservation of cultural memory. The theory and method described herein use the quilt patchwork metaphor as the basis for a web interface for designing and modeling knowledge-based graphical, narrative, and multimedia data. More specifically, the method comprises a digital storytelling and knowledge management tool that allows one or more users to create, save, store, and visually map or model digital stories. The method creates a digital network of a community's stories for digital ethnography work. Digital patches that represent the gateway to the stories of an individual are pieced together into a larger quilt design, creating a visual space that yields the voices of its creators at the click of a mouse. Through this narrative mapping, users are able to deal with complexity, ambiguity, density, and information overload. The method takes the traditional quilt use and appropriates it into a digital apparatus so that the user is connected to multiple points of view that can be dynamically tried out and compared. The hypertextual quilting method fulfills the definition of a deconstructive hypertext and emancipatory social science research methodologies by creating a collaborative, polyvocal interface where users have access to the code, content and conduits to rewrite culture's history with subaltern voices. In this digital place of intertextuality, stories are juxtaposed with images in a montage that denies the authority of a single voice and refuses fixed meaning. In dialogue, contestation, and play, the digitextuality of the Digital Story Quilt provides a praxis for critical theory. The Digital Story Quilt method concerns itself with questions of identity, the processes through which these identities are developed, the mechanics of processes of privilege and marginalization and the possibility of political action through narrative performance against these processes.

The archive and the historian are symbiotically dependent on one another. The archive relies on the historian to make use of the records it houses, and the historian looks to the archive to reconstruct history. But can a historian responsibly reconstruct history when the archive is fraught with relativity and bias? This thesis serves two purposes; one, pulling from seminal archival science and collections management texts, it chronicles the monumental, intellectual changes to American archival sciences, theories, and institutions, and two, it shows how these early conversations pertaining to archival theories are both not far removed from digital preservation efforts and at times incompatible with the unique non-analogous problems created by web-born sources. But as this thesis argues, theoretical offerings are not always the most implementable for archives; the crux of archival science has historically and contemporarily been responsibility versus practicality, particularly in regard to appraisal theory. These problems exacerbate in the digital realm where the sheer amount of records and material produced by the second warrants extremely narrow but careful collecting. To not add to the overwhelming problem of digital appraisal theory, this thesis offers tangible solutions to help mitigate irresponsible collecting practices.

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This study investigates the construction of discourse on digital inclusion in Sweden by closely analyzing policy reports from various governmental entities responsible for the digitalization agenda spanning the years 2017 to 2023. The research forms a three-dimensional approach, which focuses on discursive motivations for bridging the digital divide, perceived access prerequisites for achieving this goal, and the primary target group for digital inclusion efforts within the policy discourse. Drawing upon van Dijk's Resources and Appropriation theory, the mezzo-scaleanalysis explores how properties of digital divides related to resource inequalities and adaptation were expressed within the discourse, forming the core framework of this thesis. Fairclough's critical discourse theory (CDA) guides the macro-scale analysis; however, the large-scale view, with a focus on power relations, is not the key framework in this study. Instead, they are drawn upon in the discussion section while evaluating the key findings.The methodology employed combines CDA through close reading with exploratory text mining techniques from the Digital Humanities, revealing three key discursive motivations: 1) social participation, 2) democracy and social equality, and 3) economic prosperity. Material/physical and skills access are identified as primary prerequisites, with a particular focus on people with disabilities. A critical evaluation of these findings provides significant implications for future research on the digital divide, particularly with regards to Swedish policymaking.

This thesis examines the fissures and intersections between feminist digital media, queer theory, and Mad and disability studies. Moving across social media platforms, hashtag data, and digital gaming, this project argues for the subversive and creative potential within Mad/crip/queer digital identity performances. My theorizing of the avatar as an automedial figure in this project is attentive to the politics of the face as a site of encounter, to digital bodies and movement, to identification and community-building, and to embodiment and affects that move between on- and off-screen lives. This thesis follows the “bad avatar,” a collection of Mad digital identity practices that interrupt, disrupt, and transgress normalizing and normative digital spaces of North American settler capitalist culture. Claiming the bad avatar as a deliberate identity position is an act of claiming the label of “bad,” which here has multiple meanings: Mad queer bodies—physical and digital—are bad citizens because we break the heteronormative patriarchal rules. We’re troublemakers—we make trouble for power systems and those who embody power. We can be bad workers, unproductive and fatigued. We can be bad for capitalism and bad for nationalist morale. We also experience feelings that become pathologized and policed. As despair, panic, melancholy, and angst stick to our bodies our bodies themselves become framed as bad: sick, broken, wrong, a problem in need of fixing or eradication. Reclaiming “bad” is both a celebration of the willful subject (Ahmed 2014) and a challenge to the binary of “good/bad” that is used to oppress Mad and disabled bodies. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis theorizes the digital avatar as an automedial figure, a mode of virtual embodiment and a site of encounter. I use “avatar” to draw a connecting line between widely varied digital identity acts that occur across social media platforms and video games. This thesis examines the “bad avatar,” a collection of Mad/crip/disabled faces, bodies, and identity practices that interrupt, disrupt, and transgress the normalizing and normative digital spaces of North American settler capitalist culture. Mad/crip digital identity play offers avenues for enacting modes of resistance through the politics of representation and the processes of identity performance and community-building.

We present results from a project on sentiment analysis of drama texts, more concretely the plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. We conducted an annotation study to create a gold standard for a systematic evaluation. The gold standard consists of 200 speeches of Lessing’s plays and was manually annotated with sentiment information by five annotators. We use the gold stand-ard data to evaluate the performance of different German sentiment lexicons and processing configurations like lemmatization, the extension of lexicons with historical linguistic variants, and stop words elimination, to explore the influence of these parameters and to find best prac-tices for our domain of application. The best performing configuration accomplishes an accu-racy of 70%. We discuss the problems and challenges for sentiment analysis in this area and describe our next steps toward further research

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