Humans have always used sketches to explain the visual world. It is a simple and straight- forward mean to communicate new ideas and designs. Consequently, as in almost every aspect of our modern life, the relatively recent major developments in computer science have highly contributed to enhancing individual sketching experience. The literature of sketch related research has witnessed seminal advancements and a large body of interest- ing work. Following up with this rich literature, this dissertation provides a holistic study on sketches through three proposed novel models including sketch analysis, transfer, and geometric representation. The first part of the dissertation targets sketch authorship recognition and analysis of sketches. It provides answers to the following questions: Are simple strokes unique to the artist or designer who renders them? If so, can this idea be used to identify authorship or to classify artistic drawings? The proposed stroke authorship recognition approach is a novel method that distinguishes the authorship of 2D digitized drawings. This method converts a drawing into a histogram of stroke attributes that is discriminative of authorship. Extensive classification experiments on a large variety of datasets are conducted to validate the ability of the proposed techniques to distinguish unique authorship of artists and designers. The second part of the dissertation is concerned with sketch style transfer from one free- hand drawing to another. The proposed method exploits techniques from multi-disciplinary areas including geometrical modeling and image processing. It consists of two methods of transfer: stroke-style and brush-style transfer. (1) Stroke-style transfer aims to transfer the style of the input sketch at the stroke level to the style encountered in other sketches by other artists. This is done by modifying all the parametric stroke segments in the input, so as to minimize a global stroke-level distance between the input and target styles. (2) Brush-style transfer, on the other hand, focuses on transferring a unique brush look of a line drawing to the input sketch. In this transfer stage, we use an automatically constructed input brush dictionary to infer which sparse set of input brush elements are used at each location of the input sketch. Then, a one-to-one mapping between input and target brush elements is learned by sparsely encoding the target sketch with the input brush dictionary. The last part of the dissertation targets a geometric representation of sketches, which is vital in enabling automatic sketch analysis, synthesis and manipulation. It is based on utilizing the well known convolutional sparse coding (CSC) model. We observe that CSC is closely related to how line sketches are drawn. This process can be approximated as the sparse spatial localization of a number of typical basic strokes, which in turn can be cast as a non-standard CSC model that forms a line drawing from parametric curves. These curves are learned to optimize the fit between the model and a specific set of line drawings. Each part of the dissertation shows the utility of the proposed methods through a variety of experiments, user studies, and proposed applications.

This dissertation examines representations of authorship and subjecthood in the Romantic period as products of market position and publishing mode. In doing so, it views the traditional concept of Romantic individualism commonly associated with the solitary poet as a strategy developed to help the author navigate a complex writer’s market. Rather than focusing upon individualism as the defining authorial model for this period, however, my project presents it as one example of a diverse range of representational strategies employed by different authors operating from different positions within the market. To this end, this study compares the authorial model of the independent poet with authors engaged in a variety of other modes of publishing, including hack essayists, serialized poets, periodical editors, and celebrity authors. By examining authors operating across different publishing modes, I demonstrate that each one’s concept of public identity is shaped principally by his or her particular market position, as defined by working relationships with peers, involvement in the particulars of publishing, exchanges with the critical press, and engagement with readers. These authors include William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charles Lamb, and Francis Jeffrey. By juxtaposing their different models of authorship, this study seeks to bridge the longstanding discourse regarding the social isolation of the Romantic poet with more contemporary streams of scholarship into the material realities of the nineteenth-century publishing industry. Drawing upon the social philosophy of the Frankfurt School and Eric Gans’ theory of Generative Anthropology, I examine how different strategies of representation were developed to preserve personal meaning and sustain public attention. By comparing responses to the rise of the writer’s market and the ubiquity of print culture, this dissertation argues that Romantic period authors demonstrate a distinctly modern understanding of public identity as a product of mediation in mass media culture.

This thesis chronicles a journey for which there is no end. The journey is the author's search for authentic curriculum -- teaching and learning built around socially relevant themes, designed through an organic development process, and negotiated in relation to the interests of individual learners and the communities that support them. In struggling to find a "lens" that would allow children to navigate change in an increasingly complicated society, the author shifted her focus from the substantive domain to the perceptual. Influenced by Case's (1995) discourse regarding the nurturing of "global perspectives" in young children, the author identified nine characteristics of a "global/diversity" perspective. Rather than infusing curriculum with more information, teachers would nurture an approach to learning that permits children to suspend judgment, entertain contrary positions, anticipate complexity, and tolerate ambiguity. Through the use of "counter-hegemonic" children's literature the author found she could nurture the "seeds" of alternative perspectives forming a strong foundation for understanding and tolerance in the classroom and beyond. It is important to emphasise that the author had to internalise a "global/diversity perspective" herself in order to nurture it in others through a generative process she refers to as "living curriculum". The research methodology of currere was employed as a means of exorcising the unacknowledged biases, personal contradictions, and divergent influences that have fed the author's identity, and thus necessarily informed her philosophies and actions as an educator. The methodology of autobiography was a critical factor in permitting the author to recognise and take ownership of her own education. Autobiography led her into the tangled garden and compelled her to make sense of its organic cycles. The method of autobiography typically rattles the comfort margins of educational researchers who see it as patronising sentimentality, rather than a rigorous analysis of self-knowledge within contemporary scholarship. It is important that autobiographical researchers demonstrate resonance of their lived experience in scholarly discourse and pedagogy. The author discusses a number of possible criteria that could be used to evaluate autobiographical research - the most important of these being that the work spawns reflection and stirs praxis within the reader. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

O objetivo deste trabalho foi interpretar posições de autoria, articuladas com a relação entre memória discursiva, mito e circulação das práticas letradas. Para isso, tomamos o efeito de separação entre Mito e verdade, para, de modo contrário, considerar como prática letrada a maneira pela qual as questões trazidas pelos Mitos se apresentam entre narrativas orais contadas por uma mulher não-alfabetizada. As bases teóricas são a Análise do Discurso francesa de Pêcheux (AD), a Psicanálise e as pesquisas sobre letramento, principalmente tal como conduzidas por Tfouni e colaboradores. Em relação à metodologia, seguimos o paradigma indiciário de análise proposto por Ginzburg. A partir desses referenciais, consideramos que há uma relação estreita entre a constituição mítica do dizer (a impossibilidade de nele marcar uma origem) e a função do recalque no interdiscurso (esquecimento número um, no sentido de Pêcheux) na estabilização e distribuição dos sentidos. Além disso, entendemos que as produções discursivas (orais e escritas) disponíveis numa sociedade letrada se interpenetram, mesmo que haja desníveis no seu poderio simbólico, por conta da heterogeneidade na distribuição dos sentidos sustentada pela interdição ideológica aos arquivos. A posição de autoria é uma das maneiras de se indiciar diversas alteridades presentes nessa distribuição do sentido que se articula em práticas letradas. Dentro dessa implicação estão formas de leitura do arquivo, que incluem produções de alfabetizados e não-alfabetizados. Concorde essa fundamentação teórica e pelo paradigma indiciário, foi analisado um corpus formado por trinta e quatro narrativas orais produzidas por uma mulher não-alfabetizada e moradora da periferia de Ribeirão Preto-SP, que foram gravadas e transcritas. Nelas, apontamos as marcas, indícios e gestos de interpretação utilizados pelo sujeito-narrador, considerando que o retorno ao já dito ocorre pela marcação de fronteiras com os discursos semanticamente estabilizados e que apontam graus de letramento de natureza vária. Dentre essas marcas, a análise das seqüências discursivas apresenta: 1- os processos de re-significação de narrativas já disponíveis na tradição oral; 2- a transmissão de saberes disponíveis na memória discursiva por meio de sua reformulação articulada às estratégias interpretativas em que o interdiscurso (arquivo) conflui para uma estabilidade do fio do discurso (intradiscurso); 3- as fronteiras discursivas marcadas pelas modalizações e por uma reflexão meta-discursiva que o sujeito-narrador sustenta ao longo do fio do discurso; 4- a articulação do efeito de fechamento de genéricos discursivos (máximas, provérbios, ditos populares) com o mito individual sustentado pelo recalque originário; e por fim, 5- a distribuição de sentidos por meio de formulações não marcadas pelo sujeito-narrador o que vai ao encontro de uma noção de escritura do sujeito (Derrida) e que rompe com a supremacia logocêntrica da escrita alfabética que monopoliza o conhecimento sobre a língua. Ao apostar na alteridade entre oralidade e escrita, portanto este trabalho se posiciona num esforço interpretativo de oposição à dicotomia entre as línguas de madeira e as práticas factuais de linguagem, dicotomia esta a que também se filia a cisão entre oralidade e escrita para enfrentar o monopólio do conhecimento cooptado pela escrita e possibilitar a circulação das práticas letradas (FAPESP). / The aim of this work is to interpret the positions of authorship articulated by the relation among discourse memory, myth and the circulation of literacy practices. We, therefore, take account of the effect of separation between myth and reality to, on the contrary, consider as literacy practice the way the questions brought up by myths occur in oral narratives told by an illiterate woman. The theoretical bases are the French Discourse Analysis by Pêcheux (AAD), Psychoanalysis and research on literacy, specially the works conducted by Tfouni and co-workers. With regard to methodology, we adopted the index paradigm of analysis proposed by Ginzburg. From these references on, we claim that there is a close connection between the mythic constitution of speech (the impossibility of finding its source) and the function of suppression in the interdiscourse (forgetfulness number one for Pêcheux) along the process of stabilization and distribution of meanings. Moreover, we understand that the discourse productions (oral and written) available in a literate society are intertwined, even though they present unlevelled symbolic empowerment due to their heterogeneity of semantic distribution sustained by ideological interdiction of files. The position of authorship is one of the ways to investigate the range of alterity of semantic distribution that takes place in literacy practices. Within this implication, there are the methods of reading the social files, all of which consist of productions from literate and illiterate subjects. Hence, according to such theoretical fundaments and the index paradigm, a corpus of thirty-four oral narratives produced by an illiterate woman, who lives in the outskirts of Ribeirão Preto, was recorded, translated and analysed. In these, we point out the marks, evidences and gestures of interpretation used by the subject-narrator, signalling that the return to the pre-constructs happens through her delimitation of boundaries towards speeches semantically crystallized from levels of literacy of different natures. By and large, the analysis of discourse sequences occurs as follows: 1 the processes of re-signification of narratives traditionally verified in oral context; 2 the transmission of knowledge present in the discourse memory through reformulation linked to interpretative strategies in which the interdiscourse converges to a certain stability of plot (intradiscourse); 3 the speech boundaries that are marked by stages of modalization and a reflection of meta-discourse, which is supported along the subjects speech; 4 the articulation of closure effect of discourse genres (axioms, proverbs, popular sayings) with the individual myth sustained by original suppression; to conclude, 5 the distribution of meanings through formulations not-marked by the subject-narrator that meets his notions of written register (Derrida) and yet dissipate the logocentric alphabetic writing supremacy that monopolises knowledge over language. Having bet on alterity between oral and written registers, thus this work proposes the interpretative effort of opposing to the dichotomy among wooden languages and factual language practices; dichotomy that also suggests the rupture between oral and written registers so as to face the knowledge monopoly formed by the written language allowing the circulation of literacy practices (FAPESP).

This thesis empirically investigates alarm and prosocial words in online news headlines and the associated reads (the number of clicks), responses (including the number of likes, dislikes, and comments), and relays (the number of shares). I analyze over 170,000 online news headlines and mainly the associated number of reads and likes for each news story on an online news platform. Theoretically, based on the meta-level evolutionary theory－evolution by natural selection－I propose a middle-level evolutionary model of prosocial media effects from a nature-nurture interactive perspective. Then, I propose a specific evolutionary model that was derived from the proposed middle-level model, the human alarm system for sensational news, a psychological mechanism designed to detect and concern threatening news. I generate research questions from the specific model to test whether news headlines with alarm words attract more likes as a survival concern indirectly through an increased number of reads as a selection device, and whether prosocial words in headlines serve as a moderator. The results of a conditional indirect effect model showed that given that online readers click on (i.e, read) news headlines with alarm words, the fact that it has a prosocial word in the headlines leads readers more likely to "like" it. The empirical findings' theoretical and methodological contributions, research agenda, and examples of implications for future studies are discussed.

Fanfiction Phenomenon in Perspective of Historical Sociology My thesis presents fanfiction as a global phenomenon fully matured and adapted to the internet as its own milieu. It defines fanfiction in relation to the community that I call "online fanfiction community". It is characterized by specific forms of communication, most importantly: a specific form of active readership, where author, reader and critic merge together. Today, the full-blown sphere of internet fanfiction cannot be understood without noting its development which is tied to a new way of being an active fan in the era of mass culture. This way is characterized by fandoms, fanzines and cons which established fanspeak and forms of communication that stayed the same despite the development of new technologies. My thesis also discusses the interpretation of online fanfiction community as a subculture. It describes the strategies used by the community to keep itself apolitical and egalitarian and also these to keep activism of the fight against the repressive concept of copyright law and internet censorship separate from the fanfiction arena. My thesis also interprets fanfiction authorship as one of many concepts of authorship that are present in the frame of modernity.

"'Librarians have been forced increasingly into bibliographic activity, and have in the process developed important bibliographic techniques and forms.' The type of bibliography depends upon its use or need as a means of communication. A bio-bibliography is believed to be the most useful media for the subject chosen for this paper because the life and the works about the subject have never been brought all together. It is hoped that through this paper the reader may find readily accessible information relevant to materials by and about Elizabeth Janet Gray (Mrs. Morgan Vining)"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "June, 1953." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Sara K. Srygley, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-66).

"Some six months after the death of Margaret Wise Brown in November, 1952, Ellen Lewis Buell stated that she was the author of more than seventy books, and pointed out that with her passing the children's book publishing world had lost one of 'its most prolific writers.' An obituary notice gave the number of her publications as one hundred books 'under own name and pseudonyms.' The pseudonyms--Timothy Hay, Golden MacDonald, Juniper Sage--represented, according to Miss Brown, 'clear-cut writing personalities and distinct styles' differing from each other and from Margaret Wise Brown so greatly that, from the first draft of a book, it was perfectly clear to her just which one of her literary personalities was doing the writing. This remarkable statement, the discrepancy in the count of her books, and a curiosity about a writer who could produce in a life span of little more than forty years such a great number of books, be it seventy or one hundred, are the motivations for this paper. Its purpose is to compile from various sources a literary biography of Margaret Wise Brown and to establish the canon of her writing"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1959." / "Submitted to the Graduate School of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Robert Clapp, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references.

Typescript. / "August, 1959." / "Submitted to the Graduate School of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science." / Advisor: Sara K. Srygley, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 36-43).

The preface, " Performing Brain Surgery: The Problematic Nature of Endings in Short Fiction," deals with the many and varied difficulties short story writers encounter when attempting to craft endings. Beginning with Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor and moving to my own work, I discuss some of the obscure criteria used to designate a successful ending, as well as the more concrete idea of the ending as a unifying element. Five short stories make up the remainder of this thesis: "In-between Girls," "Crocodile Man," "Surprising Things, Sometimes Amusing," "Good Jewelry," and "The Angular Degrees of Freedom."