No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-Universty of Natal, Durban, 1982.

<p> This dissertation explores the development of genre in American cinema from its origins to 1914. Genre has long functioned as a structure of communication between artists and their audiences, organizing repetitions and variations among cultural products, but the Second Industrial Revolution, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, transformed the role that genre played in the production and circulation of cultural goods. My work proposes a history of this "industrialization of genre" in correspondence with the development of practices and strategies for the emergent motion picture trade in America. </p><p> Studying the business culture and the business of culture in the era of motion pictures' emergence, I demonstrate that though the technology and the material good of motion pictures were unique to the cinema, its commercial strategies clearly originated within the transformation of the industrial landscape and were already common to the concomitant media and entertainment trades. With this context in place, my analysis shifts to the systematization of genre particular to the American motion picture trade, locating the establishment of genre in relation, first, to transformations in the principal commodity and primary consumer. I then investigate several aspects central to the development of genres and a genre system unique to the medium of motion pictures: the emergence of the nickelodeon as a medium-privileging dispositif; the maturation of a discourse community in the trade press predominantly concerned with films; and the shift toward the horizontal alignment and vertical integration common to contemporaneous industries. The final section studies the institutionalization of genre, looking beyond the industrially determined structures to emphasize the legislation against other forms of duplication and finally to the development of a consciousness of film genres as a new type of foreknowledge for making meaning. </p><p> The institutionalization of moving pictures, I conclude, can now be further identified in relation to three genre-specific markers: the coordination of genre practices across the various sectors of the industry; the development of a medium-specific genre system; and the emergence of a motion-picture genre consciousness that helped to determine common protocols of interpretation for the mass audience of the industrially catalyzed cinema.</p>

<p> My dissertation, "Spatial Relationships in High-Dimensional, International, and Historical Data" examines the effects of distance not only in a geographical sense, but also in a higher dimensional sense where statistical distance metrics are widely used. The first two chapters of my Ph.D. thesis are closely related, and together they represent an attempt to develop a new method for computing index numbers, which are applications of statistical distance metrics. I consider distance metrics on categorical shares data, for example the proportions of a consumer's income spent on food, clothing, entertainment, and housing. Distance metrics are frequently used on such data, although all suffer from an essential flaw, which is that they treat each category as a separate, orthogonal dimension. That is, each metric assumes that every category is equally different from every other one. That assumption would be like saying Fuji apples are equally as different from Gala apples as either are to oranges, and then the distance metric is like adding apples to apples as well as apples to oranges. Because of this, the policy conclusions reached through distance measures could be greatly distorted. </p><p> The third chapter of my dissertation looks at the effect of railroads on retail prices in the United States from 1851&ndash;1892. Consistent with the theory of comparative advantage, railroads in more remote areas caused the price of agricultural goods to increase and the price of manufactured and imported goods to decline.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Harvard University, 2006. / (UnM)AAI3217752. Advisers: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich; Joyce Chaplin; Jill Lepore. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-05, Section: A, page: 1884.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Lehigh University, 2006. / Adviser: Jean R. Soderlund.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Lehigh University, 2008. / Adviser: John K. Smith.

No description available.

This thesis analyses whether the criticism that 20th c economic theory is too abstract, and lacking in economic meaning as a consequence of being mathematical, is justified, from a methodological perspective that is epistemological in character (cf ch2 and Cheix, 1996). Using, firstly the 'external' historical approach, that compares. Economics to the sciences (especially Mathematics chs 5, 6, 7, 8); and, secondly, the semiotic approach, that enquires into the contribution of notation to meaning, the thesis examines the historical and cognitive raison d'etre of mathematics in Economics. The thesis identifies (chs l, 2) 20th c mathematical-economics with model building and neoclassical theory. The main lines of argument are developed with reference to Jevons' Theory of Political Economy and Debreu's Theory of Value. This limitation is practical but not unnecessarily restrictive as the authors are major neo-classical writers, and mathematical economics has developed along the lines they envisaged. Further, neo-classical ideas have established themselves as paradigms of 20th c Economics, and have influenced theories in the social sciences and their mathematization. It is shown that Jevons (ch5) used the symbolism, and in particular, the linearity property of differentials to unify economic theory and the sciences on the pattern of Physics. For him however, the mathematization of economics involved also empirical and experimental inquiries using statistics. For the case of Debreu (ch6) it is shown how he used set-theoretic formalism and fixed point theorems to provide equilibrium theory with logico-mathematical content. This content is viewed as an axiomatic and deductive structure implying equilibrium. The definitions of mathematical economic models discussed in Part 3 show that economics was mathematized through influences not only from Physics, but also from Logic, and, more widely from the 20th c (socio-cultural) trend of model building in science. It is argued that this latter trend is not exclusively, or even necessarily, rooted in neo-classical economics. The semiotic analysis of chs 5 and 6 reveals how notations connect different interpretative levels ('isotopies') of mathematical theories, and how inconsistences may arise between these levels. The general conclusion of the thesis given certain methodological provisos, is that mathematization, in itself, is not a cause of, or explanation for, the emptiness of economic theories.

This dissertation explores intergenerational mobility and inequality in the early twentieth century. The first chapter asks whether economic downturns increase or decrease mobility. I estimate the effect of the Great Depression on mobility, linking a sample of fathers before the Depression to their sons in 1940. I find that the Great Depression lowered intergenerational mobility for sons growing up in cities hit by large downturns. The effects are driven by differential, selective migration: the sons of richer fathers are able to move to better destinations. The second chapter compares historic rates of intergenerational mobility to today. Based on a sample matched from the Iowa 1915 State Census to the 1940 Federal Census, I argue that there was more mobility in the early twentieth century than is found in contemporary data, whether measured using intergenerational elasticities, rank-rank correlations, educational persistence, or occupational status measures. In the third chapter, I detail the machine learning method used to create the linked census samples used in chapters 1 and 2. I use a supervised learning approach to record linkage, training a matching algorithm on hand-linked historical data which is able to efficiently and accurately find links in noisy in historical data. / Economics

Abstract not available.