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This thesis details the development of the full-length play, "The Curious Case of Agatha Christie." This hour-long comedic mystery was performed as part of the Big Muddy New Play Festival at the SIUC Department of Theater and Dance in February of 2022. In this comedic mystery, famous crime novelist Agatha Christie goes missing. Avid mystery novel fan and aspiring journalist at lady’s magazine Gentlewomen’s Gazette, Helen Casewell, sets out to uncover the truth behind Agatha Christie’s disappearance. The thesis begins in chapter 1 by discussing the origins for the script and the research process. Next, in chapter 2, the thesis details the writing and editing process which took place over the Fall 2021 semester in the New Play Development class. Chapter 3 of the thesis retells the pre-production process. The production is chronicled in chapter 4. Finally, chapter 5 contains an overview of my professional and creative development during my graduate studies at SIUC.

Sixteen-year-old Tiny Sinclair begins her first year at Charity Ambrose Finishing School in 1953 already feeling like an outcast: her mother, a glamorous movie star, is dead, and her father is imprisoned under suspicion of being a Communist. All her classmates seem to have it so easy: beautiful Betty is an elegant and popular socialite, while Diane, the richest girl in school, is dangerous and mysterious (and, for some reason, hell-bent on ruining Tiny's life). When a classmate is found dead and Tiny becomes the number one suspect, the situation seems to go from bad to worse. Determined to clear her name, she sets about searching for clues, when the unexpected happens: Diane and Betty want to help her solve the mystery. The unlikely trio dive into sleuthing, searching through old records, connecting clues, and scampering about the dark campus and nearby woods to search for the killer. When more students begin dying, Tiny, Betty, and Diane discover that the enemy they're looking for might not be entirely human. It will take trusting each other, a resurgence of ancient magic, and help that stems all the way back to the founding of the school for them to realize that all secrets must eventually come to light.

Studies suggest that mystery can increase curiosity and interest for certain spaces. This topic becomes highly relevant in current times when contemporary architecture turns its concerns towards sharp vision. The result is a legacy of highly instagramable buildings, that lack the quality of generating emotional engagement and pleasing other senses than vision (Pallasma, 1996). In fact, it is this impossibility to completely understand something in the visual field that characterizes mysterious spaces. Yet, the lack of clear information may cause dichotomous, sometimes overlapped, feelings. From anxiety to expectation of a pleasant reward or of finding a magical secret spot. In both cases, the consequence of mystery is feeling of anticipation and, consequently, willingness to explore the space to overcome that feeling. There seems to be a consensus among the masters of architecture about the power of light and shadow to create mysterious, curious and magic atmospheres. However, the subjectivity involved in the perception of mystery and its associations make it a hard quality to be assessed. This thesis intends to shine a light in the topic and contribute to equip architects and designers with a tool that might help to create more sensitive, engaging multisensorial architecture.

The Third Island is a novella about a Puerto Rican woman of Spanish descent who faces her biggest fear—death. Death comes in many forms and for Laura Maria De La Esperanza Castel, it comes in the form of a man with whom she thinks she is in love. Vacationing on an island in the Bahamas, novelist Laura Castel finds that the only way to survive is to overcome her fear and reject being controlled by the figure who is trying to take her. She overcomes many obstacles and is taught about self-sufficiency, the history of repression of minorities groups or of the misunderstood, and the importance of protecting those who are not able to protect themselves.

The increasing volume and complexity of text data are challenging the cognitive capabilities of expert analysts. Machine learning and crowdsourcing present new opportunities for large-scale sensemaking, but it remains a challenge to model the overall process so that many distributed agents can contribute to suitable components asynchronously and meaningfully. In this work, I explore how to crowdsource sensemaking for intelligence analysis. Specifically, I focus on the complex processes that include developing hypotheses and theories from a raw dataset and iteratively refining the analysis. I first developed Connect the Dots, a web application that implements the concept of "context slices" and supports novice crowds in building relationship networks for exploratory analysis. Then I developed CrowdIA, a software platform that implements the entire crowd sensemaking pipeline and the context slicing for each step, to enable unsupervised crowd sensemaking. Using the pipeline as a testbed, I probed the errors and bottlenecks in crowdsourced sensemaking,and suggested design recommendations for integrated crowdsourcing systems. Building on these insights and to support iterative crowd sensemaking, I developed the concept of "crowd auditing" in which an auditor examines a pipeline of crowd analyses and diagnoses the problems to steer future refinement. I explored the design space to support crowd auditing and developed CrowdTrace, a crowd auditing tool that enables novice auditors to effectively identify the important problems with the crowd analysis and create microtasks for crowd workers to fix the problems.The core contributions of this work include a pipeline that enables distributed crowd collaboration to holistic sensemaking processes, two novel concepts of "context slices" and "crowd auditing", web applications that support crowd sensemaking and auditing, as well as design implications for crowd sensemaking systems. The hope is that the crowd sensemaking pipeline can serve to accelerate research on sensemaking, and contribute to helping people conduct in-depth investigations of large collections of information. / Doctor of Philosophy / In today's world, we have access to large amounts of data that provide opportunities to solve problems at unprecedented depths and scales. While machine learning offers powerful capabilities to support data analysis, to extract meaning from raw data is cognitively demanding and requires significant person-power. Crowdsourcing aggregates human intelligence, yet it remains a challenge for many distributed agents to collaborate asynchronously and meaningfully. The contribution of this work is to explore how to use crowdsourcing to make sense of the copious and complex data. I first implemented the concept of ``context slices'', which split up complex sensemaking tasks by context, to support meaningful division of work. I developed a web application, Connect the Dots, which generates relationship networks from text documents with crowdsourcing and context slices. Then I developed a crowd sensemaking pipeline based on the expert sensemaking process. I implemented the pipeline as a web platform, CrowdIA, which guides crowds to solve mysteries without expert intervention. Using the pipeline as a testbed, I probed the errors and bottlenecks in crowd sensemaking and provided design recommendations for crowd intelligence systems. Finally, I introduced the concept of ``crowd auditing'', in which an auditor examines a pipeline of crowd analyses and diagnoses the problems to steer a top-down path of the pipeline and refine the crowd analysis. The hope is that the crowd sensemaking pipeline can serve to accelerate research on sensemaking, and contribute to helping people conduct in-depth investigations of large collections of data.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to evaluate the quality of the services provided in the selected sales unit by means of mystery shopping. The aim is to identify shortcomings and suggest possible solutions to them. The department store called PRIOR in České Budějovice was chosen for the work. A total of 24 mystery shoppings were made in October, November and December 2017.

Globale Themen benötigen adäquate Methoden des Unterrichts, um die tiefgreifende Vernetzung unserer Gesellschaft und ihr Wirken auf unseren sensiblen Naturhaushalt in Räumen moderner und flexibler Bildung greifbar werden zu lassen. Die vorliegende Staatsexamensarbeit untersucht dazu die Potentiale des Mysterys, dass an Vorwissen anknüpft, Strukturen herausarbeitet und der Lehrkraft ausreichend Freiräume lässt, Schülern auf dem Weg zum selbst erarbeitetem Wissen zu begleiten. Die Unterrichtsmethode ist in der 10. Klassenstufe eines Gymnasiums zu Dresden zu dem Thema globaler Klimawandel in die Praxis umgesetzt worden. Diese Erfahrungen sollten in die Bewertung der Methode im Hinblick auf ihren Nutzen und ihre Anwendbarkeit im Unterricht einfließen.

The subject matter of my study is representations of Russia in Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers of the 1990s. Especially suitable for representing the world split between good and evil, these genres played a prominent role in constructing the image of the other during the Cold War. Crime fiction then is an important source for grasping the changes in representing Russia after the Cold War. My hypothesis is that despite the changes in the political roles of Russia and the United States, the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union continued to have a significant impact on popular fiction about Russia in the 1990s. A comparative perspective on depictions of Russia in the 1990s is particularly suitable in regard to American and Russian popular cultures because during the Cold War, Soviet and American identities were formed in view of the other. A comparative approach to the study of Russian popular fiction is additionally justified by the role that the idea of the West had played in Russian cultural history starting from the early eighteenth century. Reflection on depictions of Russia in crime fiction by writers coming from the two formerly antagonistic cultures poses the problem of representation in its relationship to time, history, politics, popular culture, and genre. The methods used in this dissertation derive from the field of cultural studies, history, and structuralist poetics. A combination of structuralist readings and social theory allows me to uncover the ways in which popular detective genres changed in response to the sentiments of nostalgia and anxiety about repressed or lost identities, the sentiments that were typical of the 1990s. My study of Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers contributes to our understanding of the ways American and Russian cultures invent and reinvent themselves after a significant historical rupture, how they mobilize the past for making sense of the present. Drawing on readings of literature and culture by such scholars as Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Siegfried Kracauer, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, and Svetlana Boym, I show that differences in Anglo-American and Russian representations of Russia are a result of cultural asymmetries and cultural chronotopes in the United States and in Russia. I argue that Russian and American crime fiction of the 1990s re-writes Russia in the light of cultural memory, nostalgia, and historical sensibilities after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Memories of the Cold War and coming to terms with the end of the Cold War played a defining role in depicting Russia by Anglo-American detective authors of the 1990s; this role is clear from the genre changes in Anglo-American thrillers about Russia. Similarly, reconsideration of Russian history became an essential characteristic in the development of the new Russian detektiv.