Over the past 20 years, scrapbooking has become immensely popular in America. This dissertation is the study of scrapworthy lives, that is, how lives become structured by scrapbooking and how people show others that their own life and the lives of their loves ones are value—or scrapworthy. I conducted in-depth interviews with 38 scrapbookers, 11 scrapbook industry workers, and 10 family and friends of scrapbookers. I also used photo-elicitation interviewing techniques with both the scrapbookers and the family members and friends of 10 scrapbookers to examine a selection of scrapbook pages the respondents had completed. I used grounded theory methods to analyze my data, providing a more thorough understanding of scrapbooking. Scrapbooks are a site where people socially construct a narrative of their life. Through scrapbooking, scrapbookers do gender, family, race, ethnicity, and religion. Stratification within the larger society can be seen within the scrapbooking thought community. Moreover, through scrapbooking, people can demonstrate their membership in other thought communities (e.g., motherhood). Though scrapbookers are able to demonstrate their gender, family status, race, ethnicity, and religion through scrapbooking, the hobby is done primarily for the scrapbookers and not for others. Scrapbooking is a leisure activity, though some may consider it as a form of work. Scrapbookers are a thought community in their own right and an excellent site to explore Zerubavel’s (1997) six cognitive acts (i.e., perceiving, classifying, reckoning time, attending, assigning meaning, and remembering). In particular, scrapbookers come to classify nearly everything (including people, things, time, and space) in the world around them as either scrapworthy or not. Scrapbooks are a modern narrative form, though versions of scrapbooks have been around for centuries. Scrapbooks are memorials about everyday life. The content of scrapbooks is what is left out of the typical history book but is considered just as memorable by scrapbookers. Scrapbookers are storytellers. These stories could just as easily be passed down orally or recorded on blogs and some scrapbooks combine elements of oral histories and blogs. Ultimately, scrapbooks are memorials about the scrapbooker.

The aim of the thesis is to design and implement a GIS tool for mobile devices. The beginning of the thesis informs about the theoretical background of GIS and mapping. Subsequently, the thesis deals with the concept of a mobile mapping tool. The thesis describes the architecture and processes within the tool, as well as some details regarding its implementation. A mapping of a selected geographical location and a protocol summarising the mapping are also included within the thesis.

In this thesis I present new insights into aspects of Peter Guthrie Tait's life and work, derived principally from largely-unexplored primary source material: Tait's scrapbook, the Tait–Maxwell school-book and Tait's pocket notebook. By way of associated historical insights, I also come to discuss the innovative and far-reaching mathematics of the elusive Frenchman, C.-V. Mourey. P. G. Tait (1831–1901) F.R.S.E., Professor of Mathematics at the Queen's College, Belfast (1854–1860) and of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (1860–1901), was one of the leading physicists and mathematicians in Europe in the nineteenth century. His expertise encompassed the breadth of physical science and mathematics. However, since the nineteenth century he has been unfortunately overlooked—overshadowed, perhaps, by the brilliance of his personal friends, James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) and William Thomson (1824–1907), later Lord Kelvin. Here I present the results of extensive research into the Tait family history. I explore the spiritual aspect of Tait's life in connection with The Unseen Universe (1875) which Tait co-authored with Balfour Stewart (1828–1887). I also reveal Tait's surprising involvement in statistics and give an account of his introduction to complex numbers, as a schoolboy at the Edinburgh Academy. A highlight of the thesis is a re-evaluation of C.-V. Mourey's 1828 work, La Vraie Théorie des quantités négatives et des quantités prétendues imaginaires, which I consider from the perspective of algebraic reform. The thesis also contains: (i) a transcription of an unpublished paper by Hamilton on the fundamental theorem of algebra which was inspired by Mourey and (ii) new biographical information on Mourey.