The field of writing studies has long inquired about how writers engage in individualized writing processes. As an extension of this inquiry, contemporary scholarship in writing studies began to study collaborative writing through the understanding of writing as a social act. Our understanding of writing processes and collaborative writing has expanded through studies of writing as it occurs in the academy, the workplace, and extracurricular settings. Still, to a large extent, inquiries about writing processes and collaborative writing activity centered on alphabetic texts and focused on writers. Rarely do studies engage"in addition to writers"artists and designers as authors in the collaborative writing process. Composing, as understood by scholars and teachers of writing, is changing due to technological shifts in media and yet, as a field, we have failed to question multimodal composing as an individual or collaborative process.<br />    To extend previous writing studies scholarship, this dissertation engages qualitative case study methodology to explore three unique multimodal collaborations of comics authors. As a visual rhetoric scholar with a personal focus on teaching students about composing in all media, I am drawn to asking questions about how arguments are composed using multimodal means. My personal and scholarly interest in comics led to inquiries about how comics are composed and initial research found that comics are often composed in collaboration, with writers and artists who with them carry multiple and varying literacies (alphabetic text, visual, spatial, etc.). Comics provide a rich subject of study to address this inquiry because of their inherently multimodal nature as a medium that incorporates both word and picture in diverse combinations and for a variety of rhetorical purposes. For this study, I have chosen to focus on comics texts that differ in terms of subject matter, genre, and collaborative makeup in order to examine multimodal collaborations and create distinct cases. Through three cases of multimodal collaboration"Understanding Rhetoric, the Cheo comics, and Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline"this study argues for a further complication of our field\'s understanding of writing processes and collaborative composing. / Ph. D.

<p> The logit format for a modal split model, which has previously been used for only binary cases, is used to build a new set of behavioural, probabilistic, multi-mode models. The models and the testing were carried out on a CDC 6400 Computer. </p> <p> A program developed at Chicago was used to construct the models while a separate program was developed to analyze the results. The type and number of variables to be used in the different sections of the model were investigated and an attempt was made to find the best method of aggregation. An inferred 'value of time' was also calculated and statistical testing of the individual and aggregate models was made. </p> <p> It is shown that this method of modelling is indeed feasible in terms of the significance of the models and the accuracy of the predictions on a separate data set. </p> / Thesis / Master of Engineering (ME)

Läromedel i matematik använder sig av olika slags semiotiska resurser såsom bilder, figurer och tabeller för att stötta elevers förståelse. Syftet med denna studie var att analysera bilder i tre utvalda läromedel som heter Rik matematik, Triumf och Silvergruvan. Studien gjordes ur ett semiotiskt och relationellt perspektiv för att ta reda på vilka semiotiska resurser som finns i de utvalda läromedlen, hur de används och om de är till för- eller nackdel för elever med neuropsykiatriska funktionsnedsättningar (NPF). Studien visar att det finns mycket bilder i de valda läromedlen, de flesta bilder är till stöd för uppgifterna även om de ibland inte är placerade till fördel för uppgiften. Det visade sig också att elever med NPF behöver ett mer anpassat läromedel än de som används i dag. Studien visar att det finns läromedel som passar elever med NPF mer eller mindre bra. Det finns många olika läromedel att välja mellan, vissa mer färgglada än andra. Dessa riskerar att gå före de läromedel som är mer avskalade i färg och antal bilder, även om det är de som är de bästa läromedlen för eleverna. Det är därför viktigt att läraren väljer läromedel som är anpassade efter de behoven som finns i klassrummet och de elever som ska undervisas.

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The purpose of this study was to examine general music teachers' practices and attitudes regarding the use of multimodal pedagogy in music instruction. A survey design was used to explore the extent to which general music teachers, in a delimited geographical area in southeastern Pennsylvania, use multimodal pedagogy and their attitudes towards it. Data were gathered by contacting 600 potential participants via email and inviting them to take part. Of the 600 contacted, 170 respondents participated in the study (28% response rate). In total, 127 completed the survey and were considered by the researcher to be appropriate for analysis. General music teachers reported that the most frequent teaching modalities used while planning, teaching, and assessing their students were, in decreasing order of frequency, aural, multimodal, visual, and kinesthetic modality. However, this array of modalities was used less frequently while assessing students than planning and teaching. The majority of respondents favored the use of aural modality while assessing their students. The availability of movement materials predicted general music teachers' use of multimodal pedagogy while planning, teaching and assessing students. Gender, teachers' educational degree, professional development, the availability of percussion instruments, and iPad and tablets predicted general music teachers' use of multimodal pedagogy while assessing students. Attending Orff, Kodály, and Dalcroze professional development programs had a significant relationship with general music teachers' use of multimodal pedagogy while planning and assessing their students. Responses to the open-ended questions provided evidence of how general music teachers actually experience the application of multimodal pedagogy in the classroom. Specifically, the responses showed how individual teachers considered students' learning styles while planning and teaching, and assessing to secure students' success. General music teachers reported a generally positive attitude towards the use of multimodal pedagogy. The availability of Orff instruments was a positive predictor, and guitar was a negative predictor for general music teachers' attitudes towards the use of multimodal pedagogy. Attending Orff, Kodály, and Music Learning Theory (MLT) professional development workshops had a significant relationship with the music teachers' attitude towards the use of multimodal pedagogy. These factors that contributed to general music teachers' positive attitudes towards the use of multimodal pedagogy partially because Kodály, MLT, and Orff techniques including Orff instruments encouraged general music teachers to incorporate different learning modalities inside the music classroom. The open-ended question captured the participants' voices and provided further evidence of general music teachers' positive attitudes towards the use of multimodal pedagogy and how they recognize the benefits of using it. These results have implications for music educators that include developing professional development programs designed to assist in the use of multiple modalities. Recommendations for further research include examining the effects of multimodal music pedagogy on elementary students' acquisition of specific music skills (e.g., singing voice, rhythmic achievement). / Music Education

Recent investigations into infants' intersensory perception suggest a specific developmental pattern for infants' attention to visible and auditory attributes of dynamic human faces. This work has proposed that infants' perception seems to progress along a sensory continuum: beginning with multimodal sensory cues (e.g., auditory and visual), then visual-cues alone, and finally auditory-cues alone. Additionally, research has proposed that amodal or invariant sensory information directs infants' attention to specific redundant aspects in the surrounding environment (e.g., temporal synchronicity). The current research attempted to clarify the potential methodological confounds contained in previous investigations into infant intersensory development by contrasting infant behavior within fixed trial and infant-controlled habituation procedures. Moreover, the current research examined infants' attention to auditory manipulations within multimodal displays when redundant sensory information (synchronicity) was or was not available. In Experiment 1, 4-month-old infants were habituated to complex audiovisual displays of a male or female face within an infant controlled habituation procedure, and then tested for response recovery to a change in voice. For half the infants, the change in voice maintained synchronicity with the face, and for the other half, it did not. The results showed significant response recovery (i.e., dishabituation) to the change in voice regardless of the synchronicity condition. In Experiment 2, 4-month-old infants received the same face+voice test recordings used in Experiment 1, but now within a fixed trial habituation procedure. Again, synchronicity was manipulated across groups of infants. In contrast to Experiment 1, the infants in the fixed-trial experiment failed to show evidence of voice discrimination. These results suggest that infant controlled procedures may be more sensitive to infant attention, especially in terms of complex social displays. In addition, synchronicity appeared to be unnecessary in terms of infants' ability to detect vocal differences across multimodal displays. In sum, these results highlight the importance of research methodology (e.g., infant control) and overall stimulus complexity (e.g., discrete vs. complex) involving studies of infants' intersensory development. / Ph. D.

A critical first step to improving existing and designing future wide-area networks is an understanding of the load placed on these networks. Efforts to model traffic are often confounded by atypical traffic - traffic particular to the observation site not ubiquitously applicable. The causes and characteristics of atypical traffic are explored in this thesis. Atypical traffic is found to interfere with parsimonious analytic traffic models. A detection and modeling technique is presented and studied for atypical traffic characterized by strongly clustered inliers. This technique is found to be effective using both real-world observations and simulated data. Another form of atypical traffic is shown to result in multimodal distributions of connection statistics. Putative methods for bimodal estimation are reviewed and a novel technique, the midpoint-distance profile, is presented. The performance of these estimation techniques is studied via simulation and the methods are examined in the context of atypical network traffic. The advantages and disadvantages of each method are reported. / Master of Science

The task of comprehending charts [1, 2, 3] presents significant challenges for machine learning models due to the diverse and intricate shapes of charts. The chart extraction task ensures the precise identification of key components, while the chart question answering (ChartQA) task integrates visual and textual information, facilitating accurate responses to queries based on the chart's content. To approach ChartQA, this research focuses on two main aspects. Firstly, we introduce ChartFormer, an integrated framework that simultaneously identifies and classifies every chart element. ChartFormer extends beyond traditional data visualization by identifying descriptive components such as the chart title, legend, and axes, providing a comprehensive understanding of the chart's content. ChartFormer is particularly effective for complex instance segmentation tasks that involve a wide variety of class objects with unique visual structures. It utilizes an end-to-end transformer architecture, which enhances its ability to handle the intricacies of diverse and distinct object features. Secondly, we present Question-guided Deformable Co-Attention (QDCAt), which facilitates multimodal fusion by incorporating question information into a deformable offset network and enhancing visual representation from ChartFormer through a deformable co-attention block. / Master of Science / Real-world data often encompasses multimodal information, blending textual descriptions with visual representations. Charts, in particular, pose a significant challenge for machine learning models due to their condensed and complex structure. Existing multimodal methods often neglect these graphics, failing to integrate them effectively. To address this gap, we introduce ChartFormer, a unified framework designed to enhance chart understanding through instance segmentation, and a novel Question-guided Deformable Co-Attention (QDCAt) mechanism. This approach seamlessly integrates visual and textual features for chart question answering (ChartQA), allowing for more comprehensive reasoning. ChartFormer excels at identifying and classifying chart components such as bars, lines, pies, titles, legends, and axes. The QDCAt mechanism further enhances multimodal fusion by aligning textual information with visual cues, thereby improving answer accuracy. By dynamically adjusting attention based on the question context, QDCAt ensures that the model focuses on the most relevant parts of the chart. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ChartFormer and QDChart significantly outperform their baseline models in chart component recognition and ChartQA tasks by 3.2% in mAP and 15.4% in accuracy, respectively, providing a robust solution for detailed visual data interpretation across various applications. These results highlight the efficacy of our approach in providing a robust solution for detailed visual data interpretation, making it applicable to a wide range of domains, from scientific research to financial analysis and beyond.

This book chapter indicates a further application of theories of multimodal communication applied to naturally occurring text, in this instance to documentary film making. Instead of producing a model of genre the intention here was to perform a descriptive analysis of composition in the documentary form as a whole and applied to a specific film, Godfrey Reggio¿s Koyanisquatsi. The analysis here was intended to establish further low-level spatial attributes that could be applied to visual and multimodal texts. Framing is a particularly powerful yet often transparent feature of multimodal texts and this chapter was an attempt to develop a rigorous application of many aspects of composition to the critical analysis of film. This is another natural progression from the previous publication as the intention here was to embed the use of framing as a technique in the construction of multimodal texts, such as film, within the critical discourse of representation in film. In doing so the chapter draws from many different `flavours¿ of semiotic theory, from theories of visual design, linguistics, and theories of `spectacle¿. This book chapter is one of the first extended applications of framing from the perspective of multimodality to the documentary film genre. It also brings together important critical approaches to film into a unified theory of representation in the documentary form.