Cultural heritage digital libraries have become an important and prominent tool within humanities scholarship, offering increased expressive power for representing complex networks of relationships and the ability to use computational tools and interactive environments to help researchers ask new questions. While digital libraries offer tremendous advantages for publishing the final products of scholarship, in the words of Bradley and Vetch, "as they currently are delivered, do not intersect terribly meaningfully with the process of scholarly research." In this work I investigate how scholars use visually complex source documents-materials where access to a visual representation of the original object is required and present a prototype system, CritSpace designed to facilitate scholarly engagement with digital resources. Rather than creating a one-size-fits-all application, CritSpace is a web-based framework for building interactive visual interfaces that support scholarly use of digital libraries. The theory and design behind CritSpace is based on a formative study of the work practices of scholars from different disciplines and prior research in field of spatial hypertext. To illustrate a concrete example of using CritSpace and to evaluate its usefulness, I conclude with a case study that walks through the process of deploying CritSpace to support work in a specific scholarly domain, textual criticism and presents a summative usability study of the tool. The results of this study show that CritSpace is effective at supporting textual criticism. More significantly, they also indicate that the innovations added in CritSpace promote the intensive analysis of visual material in addition to knowledge organization and structuring.

This thesis delves into the surprisingly uniform treatment of the female character in comic storytelling, across all media, and will examine how this has evolved over time. It further explores what these changes represent for the stories, the characters, the creators, and the readers. The focus of the production aspects of this project is on the curation and development of a feminist perspective on comic books, their narrative and the industry that forms them. Looking at specific examples from historical and modern comics, as well as creative

Dating back to the dialectic between Socrates and Plato, innovative technologies have disrupted the traditions of discourse and created cultural divisions relevant to composition studies. These conversations are echoed in the Twentieth Century through the work of Melvin Kranzberg. Looking to the future, he sought to record the history of technology to maintain the constant upsurge of innovation. Like Kranzberg’s history of technology, the field of rhetoric and composition and this thesis seek to define technology and understand its value in order to navigate and interrogate effectively the deluge of twenty-first-century new media. Kranzberg—like many scholars in computers and composition—utilized various rhetorics to advocate for technological literacy despite its unpopularity in the academy.

As digital books begin to take center stage in our lives the importance of the old printed book still lingers on. A large number of the books printed on the paper media still have much to offer to readers for various reasons (e.g. less famous authors of prose, old books with interesting and original problems). To help individuals in digitizing and reusing their physical and digital books we decided to build a framework that will help people convert physical and digital books to other formats taking into consideration four dimensions: learning outcomes or methodology, target device characteristics, representation and the user. Our focus is on textbooks in history. Consequently, we do not consider some problems like math formulas. This work has the potential of helping people deal with the huge backlog of physical books that can become invisible as the digital books take off. To show that our platform can help in repurposing books for student study activities, we have developed some transformations. The transformations we have implemented shows that the framework can be used to add study aids to books, optimize books for a target platform (e-reader device and application combination), and supplement available features of a target platform and maintain consistency across various audio/visual devices and e-book formats. One of the important steps in the thesis was determining the study activities that we would support as examples in our implementation. We have chosen to implement support for the survey, question, read and review activities of the SQ3R reading technique. We have also implemented support for additional activities like search. The chosen activities and the support implemented for these activities are examples and are not meant to be complete. Another important decision point was to decide which target platforms (e-reader device and application combination) we need to support. We decided to choose a few representatives and leave the rest as future work. The target devices were selected so as to have a variety of device capabilities like screen size, display technology (e.g. e-ink, VGA), and user interaction styles (e.g. touch-based, button based) combined with application capabilities (e.g. audio only, visual only, audio visual, grayscale, and color). The devices selected were: iPad, iPod, iPhone, Kindle 3rd generation, Kindle Fire, Sony PRS and a laptop. The e-reader applications are the ones that are available for these devices.

This thesis adds to the discussion surrounding how Apple Inc. has been able to to garner and maintain such a loyal brand following. With the help of background from theory on branding, it examines the uses of Michel Foucault’s heterotopia and religious allegory within Apple’s branding strategies. With the help of past discussions surrounding these topics, the presence of these uses in present day Apple branding is exemplified in the description and analysis of Apple’s 2014 “Your Verse Anthem” and the Apple Store as a branded space. Through this analysis, this thesis also makes an original argument for a consistent Apple heterotopia that is inherently religious. This heterotopia mirrors the story of Adam and Eve as, within its story, Apple promises that if their consumers will become loyal to the Apple brand by taking a bit out of Apple’s “forbidden fruit,” signified in their logo, Apple will help them see the truth of the Tree of Knowledge, which will help them understand that they need not conform but can instead use Apple products to realize their aspirations and create a life that represents their own version of utopia. This characteristically Apple religious heterotopia and the tactics used by Apple as a whole come together to draw the connection between Apple and the strategies used by cult leaders. This connection ultimately helps explain the loyalty and fever behind Apple’s consumer following.

This project examines the role played by chaos in shaping and defining the translation activity in a non-hegemonic context, with a focus on literary translation. Based on English-language U.S. and Canadian contemporary poetry translation into Romanian between 1960 and 2017, it challenges the ‘major’ vs. ‘minor’ dichotomy and moves to show that a transnational framework and a networked understanding of translator agency are much better suited to account for the complexity of a translation sociography. Acknowledging a necessary shift that draws on an economy of attention more than on an economy of production (Cronin 2016), as well as on Michael Cronin’s politics of microspection and on Kobus Marais’ paradigm of complexity (2014), my work takes distance from the Bourdieusian dynamics of power that has prevailed in translation studies since the late 1990s and favors a network approach that accounts for disruption, decentralization, and voids. This dissertation seeks to acknowledge the role played by chance, chaos, and self-regulation in shaping the activity of literary translation through the deployment of a mathematical model that has been at the core of Web 2.0 since its very inception. In doing so, my research sets out to complement Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory with the mathematical notions of network and network of networks. I endeavor to explore the webs of connectivity as they appear in real-life contemporary poetry translator networks with the purpose of potentially laying the groundwork for a possible redefinition of translation across society and media of circulation. Translation can be conceived, I propose, as an act that is essentially, simultaneously and irreducibly linguistic, cultural, and social, but also individual and collective, material and virtual, online and offline. Under these circumstances, I conclude that a critical re-examination of translation studies in micromodernity through a Digital Humanities lens becomes necessary, if not imperative.

abstract: Computational tools in the digital humanities often either work on the macro-scale, enabling researchers to analyze huge amounts of data, or on the micro-scale, supporting scholars in the interpretation and analysis of individual documents. The proposed research system that was developed in the context of this dissertation ("Quadriga System") works to bridge these two extremes by offering tools to support close reading and interpretation of texts, while at the same time providing a means for collaboration and data collection that could lead to analyses based on big datasets. In the field of history of science, researchers usually use unstructured data such as texts or images. To computationally analyze such data, it first has to be transformed into a machine-understandable format. The Quadriga System is based on the idea to represent texts as graphs of contextualized triples (or quadruples). Those graphs (or networks) can then be mathematically analyzed and visualized. This dissertation describes two projects that use the Quadriga System for the analysis and exploration of texts and the creation of social networks. Furthermore, a model for digital humanities education is proposed that brings together students from the humanities and computer science in order to develop user-oriented, innovative tools, methods, and infrastructures. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Biology 2014

abstract: "Romantic Cyber-Engagement" offers a new type of dissertation organized around three projects that combine the core values of the Digital Humanities with the hypertext tradition of scholarly pursuits in the field of Romanticism. The first of the three Digital Humanities contributions is to the profession. "A Resource for the Future: The ICR Template and Template Guide" articulates a template for the construction and operation of an advanced conference in Romantic studies. This part of the project includes the conference web site template and guide, which is publicly available to all interested organizations; the template guide includes instructions, tutorials, and advice to govern modification of the template for easier adaptation for future conferences. The second project, "Collaborative Literature Projects in the Digital Age: The Frankenstein Project" is a functional pedagogical example of one way to incorporate Digital Humanities praxis as an interactive part of a college course. This part of the dissertation explains the "Frankenstein Project," a web site that I created for an undergraduate critical theory course where the students contributed various critical approaches for sections of the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The final project, "'[W]hat they half-create, / And what perceive': The Creation of a Hypertext Scholarly Edition of 'Tintern Abbey;'" is a critical approaches section in which I created an interactive web site that focused on the primary work, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey: On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798." This advanced, multimodal site allows viewers to examine various critical approaches to each section of the primary work, and the viewer/reader can interactively engage the text in dialogue by contributing their own interpretation or critical approach. In addition to the three products and analysis generated from this dissertation, the project as a whole offers an initial Digital Humanities model for future dissertations in discipline of English Literature. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2013

"Royalty Free" is a video game that looks like a gallery, containing a curated selection of custom plant objects made by fans of The Sims franchise. By exploring the visual style and social-technical activities of players outside the game, it both appreciates and speculates about the potential future of 3D computer graphics as an expressive medium.

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