Characterization in Pulitzer-awarded features and traditional features was measured using a characterization typology developed by the author. Although some of the results were statistically constrained by a small n, those results which were statistically significant reflect that what separates Pulitzer-winning features from regular features are those elements of characterization particular to scene: a character's distinctive physical characteristics, clothing and possessions; the setting and environment as it defines a character; a physical description of character that is not lineament nor habitual posture or expression but bodily appearance in the immediate moment; a character's movements and actions, facial expressions, words, and thoughts. In an era when the predicted demise of newspapers is more fact than fiction, the reader's experience with newspapers is paramount. Crucial to the news reading experience is the reader's enjoyment: how "I" experienced a story through empathy, parasocial interaction, and/or identification. Perhaps a solution to newspapers' loss of readership is scene: within scene, fear, anguish, exhilaration, and joy are not only the experiences of the characters, but also that of the reader's.

Previous research showed that combining three different optical character recognition (OCR) engines (ExperVision® OCR, Scansoft OCR, and Abbyy® OCR) results using voting algorithms will get higher accuracy rate than each of the engines individually. While a voting algorithm has been realized, several aspects to automate and improve the accuracy rate needed further research. This thesis will focus on morphological image preprocessing and morphological text restoration that goes to OCR engines. This method is similar to the one used in restoration partial finger prints. Series of morphological dilating and eroding filters of various mask shapes and sizes were applied to text of different font sizes and types with various noises added. These images were then processed by the OCR engines, and based on these results successful combinations of text, noise, and filters were chosen. The thesis will also deal with the problem of text alignment. Each OCR engine has its own way of dealing with noise and corrupted characters; as a result, the output texts of OCR engines have different lengths and number of words. This in turn, makes it impossible to use spaces a delimiter as a method to separate the words for processing by the voting part of the system. Text aligning determines, using various techniques, what is an extra word, what is supposed to be two or more words instead of one, which words are missing in one document compared to the other, etc. Alignment algorithm is made up of a series of shifts in the two texts to determine which parts are similar and which are not. Since errors made by OCR engines are due to visual misrecognition, in addition to simple character comparison (equal or not), a technique was developed that allows comparison of characters based on how they look.

To step into a character and a world of the past, the actor must not discard the present, but seek to find connections and links between the worlds. I was cast in the Orlando Shakespeare Theater production of Sense and Sensibility, a Jon Jory adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel, in the role of Lucy Steele. This was an equity production, and it ran February 6th – March 17th, 2013, in the Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s Margeson Theater. Lucy is a female character from England in a period often referred to as the Regency era. As a woman from today’s United States of America, first I explored how Lucy’s words and actions fit into the society of her time, and second I explored how I, a contemporary actor, could organically step into her shoes. One of the greatest tools I had to help me address these questions was the playwright himself, Jon Jory. He was at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater for the 2012 Harriett Lake Festival of New Plays, during which he gave a keynote address and taught a master class in acting, in which I participated. Furthermore, I had the unique opportunity to personally interview him regarding Sense and Sensibility and his connection to the world of Austen and her characters. Along with applying this insight, I applied tools from his acting master class to my work on his Sense and Sensibility text. This special access to the playwright greatly influenced the work and served as a key into Lucy’s world. In addition to working with the playwright, I further researched Austen and her work, because Lucy and her world originate there. I explored various resources about England’s Regency era society and the role of women in this society. By comparing the world and people of the play to the current cultural and political landscape with which I am most familiar, I found iii fundamental links between people living in different times and places, breaking down walls between Lucy’s world and my own. Finally, this performance thesis project utilized the practical acting, voice, and movement skills, which I cultivated in my studio work as an MFA acting candidate at the University of Central Florida. It was a wonderful opportunity as an aspiring young actor to participate in an equity production and work with professional actors. I exercised my stage dialects training by using a standard British dialect, and I applied what I learned in my theatre styles acting class and in various movement classes to develop the behavior and physicality of my character. In order to preserve the new information gained from this study, I chronicled my explorations and discoveries throughout the rehearsal and production process. Through my work with the playwright Jon Jory, my research on Jane Austen and the Regency era, and my application of what I learned in the studio, I strove to create a model process for an actor to utilize when stepping into a role and a world of the past.

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As more schools consider ways to help students to develop not only academically but also socially and emotionally, school personnel look to formal programs of character education to help address the needs of the whole child. Of these programs of character education, Berkowitz and Bier (2005) posit that effective programs begin by promoting positive social relationships within the school. One measure of the quality of the social relationships in schools is reflected in the level of belonging or connectedness that students feel toward their school and members of the school community. Consequently, the purpose of the present study was to further the investigation of the construct of sense of school belonging and its relationship to formal programs of character education. Eighth-grade students (732) from five middle schools – three character program schools and two non-character program schools – were surveyed measuring sense of school belonging by their responses on the total score of the Psychological Sense of School Membership (PSSM) scale developed by Goodenow (1993) and on the four sub-scores of the PSSM demonstrated by Ye and Wallace (2013). No significant differences were found for student sense of belonging between character program schools and non-character program schools. However, the study also investigated the effect of structural and perceptual elements of character education programs that were found to positively relate to student sense of school belonging. Students who identified themselves as being part of a character education group in their school reported significantly higher levels of sense of belonging (on the total score of the PSSM and on the PSSM factors of Identification and Participation in School, Perception of Fitting in Among Peers, and Generalized Connection to Teachers) than those students who did not identify as being part of a character education group. In addition, students reported statistically significant higher levels of sense of belonging a) the more they felt accepted by other students in their group, b) the more they felt accepted by their adult group advisor, c) the more they felt able to express opinions in their group, d) the more they felt their group was like a family, and e) the more they felt character education groups made their school a better place. Sense of belonging was also positively related to more frequent opportunities for character education group meetings and to a common school language that emphasized moral character more than performance character. / Educational Leadership

Hantering av ostrukturerade och fysiska dokument inom vissa områden, såsom finansiell rapportering, medför betydande ineffektivitet i dagsläget. Detta examensarbete fokuserar på utmaningen att extrahera data från ostrukturerade finansiella dokument, specifikt balansräkningar i svenska årsredovisningar, genom att använda en AI-driven pipeline. Syftet är att utveckla en metod för att automatisera datautvinning och möjliggöra förbättrad dataanalys. Projektet fokuserade på att automatisera utvinning av finansiella poster från balansräkningar genom en kombination av Optical Character Recognition (OCR) och en modell för Named Entity Recognition (NER). TesseractOCR användes för att konvertera skannade dokument till digital text, medan en BERT-baserad NER-modell tränades för att identifiera och klassificera relevanta finansiella poster. Ett Python-skript användes för att extrahera de numeriska värdena som är associerade med dessa poster. Projektet fann att NER-modellen uppnådde hög prestanda, med ett F1-score på 0,95, vilket visar dess effektivitet i att identifiera finansiella poster. Den fullständiga pipelinen lyckades extrahera över 99% av posterna från balansräkningar med en träffsäkerhet på cirka 90% för numerisk data. Projektet drar slutsatsen att kombinationen av OCR och NER är en lovande lösning för att automatisera datautvinning från ostrukturerade dokument med liknande attribut som årsredovisningar. Framtida arbeten kan utforska att förbättra träffsäkerheten i OCR och utvidga utvinningen till andra sektioner av olika typer av ostrukturerade dokument. / The persistence of unstructured and physical document management in fields such as financial reporting presents notable inefficiencies. This thesis addresses the challenge of extracting valuable data from unstructured financial documents, specifically balance sheets in Swedish annual reports, using an AI-driven pipeline. The objective is to develop a method to automate data extraction, enabling enhanced data analysis capabilities. The project focused on automating the extraction of financial posts from balance sheets using a combination of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model. TesseractOCR was used to convert scanned documents into digital text, while a fine-tuned BERT-based NER model was trained to identify and classify relevant financial features. A Python script was employed to extract the numerical values associated with these features. The study found that the NER model achieved high performance metrics, with an F1-score of 0.95, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying financial entities. The full pipeline successfully extracted over 99% of features from balance sheets with an accuracy of about 90% for numerical data. The project concludes that combining OCR and NER technologies could be a promising solution for automating data extraction from unstructured documents with similar attributes to annual reports. Future work could explore enhancing OCR accuracy and extending the methodology to other sections of different types of unstructured documents.

This thesis research explores the patterns of player-character relationships and player-character attachment in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) and Genshin Impact (2020). The purpose of the paper is to fill in the existing gap in the literature concerning the psychological and social mechanisms of attachment that players form with non-customizable game characters. The research explores the nature of player-character attachment in its relation to game mechanics and broader social context, as well as its transformative potential.   The research relies on interdisciplinary mixed-methods methodology, drawing from the fields of psychology and anthropology. The first part of the research employs auto-ethnographic data on the authors' personal relationships with game characters. The second part involves a series of qualitative in-depth interviews with players of Animal Crossing and Genshin Impact. Thematic analysis with the elements of case-study methodology is applied to the interview data. The results of the interview analysis are compared between the two player groups, as well as to the findings of the auto-ethnographic inquiry. The main results of the comparative analysis suggest that players’ perceptions of characters in the studied games can be categorized as character-as-object and character-as-other. Further on, a distinction can be made between two types of attachment that players form with characters-as-others. The first one is player-for-character, focused primarily on a player’s relatedness and empathy towards a character. The second one is character-for-player, where a game character is perceived as a supporting and caring figure that transcends the boundaries of the game. The relationship types are not mutually exclusive, and both of them have been found to have transformative potential.

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In this study, I challenge previous assumptions on Thucydides’ silence on gender in the History in order to understand this erasure as a central component of the historian’s attempt at asserting authorial control over a narrative of crisis. My project investigates the gendered strategies employed by Attic tragedy and historiography to represent defiant speakers – characters who challenge traditional speech, like Antigone or the Corcyreans, or those who speak ambiguously, like Cassandra and Alcibiades – in the context of 5th century Athens. Rather than offering a historical reconstruction of the relationship between Thucydidean historiography and drama, my project presents a theoretical reorientation of how the two genres can and should be read in parallel. Methodologically, I integrate close readings with the insights afforded by Anne Carson’s creative engagements with antiquity in order to analyze how gender structures the meaning-making systems in these narratives. Following a chronotropic trajectory, this dissertation investigates how gender refracts through the ways in which the tragedians and Thucydides represent issues of time, space and place, and perception; it then ends by returning to time to offer a critical re-evaluation of the receptions and afterlives of Greek tragedy and history. Ultimately, this study offers a methodology that helps us model a parallel reading of Attic tragedy and Thucydidean historiography; not in order to “test out” the historicity of tragedy against Thucydides’ account, but rather to use tragedy to fill the gap of gender in the History. Probing this dialogue – a dialogue informed as much by silence and omission as by contact and shared vocabulary – among ancient and modern, tragic and historiographic, originary and receptive models of literary entanglement challenges us to rethink the political potential of transgressive speakers within canonical narratives, and to reflect on the role that gender has in shaping these discursive tensions.

I denna studie undersöks hur de grafiska aspekterna av karaktärsskapande påverkar spelare och deras engagemang i singleplayerspel. Syftet med studien är att undersöka vilken betydelse utseendet på spelarskapade karaktärer har för spelares engagemang och ifall det påverkar deras spelande. Semi-strukturerade intervjuer utfördes med sex deltagare där teman som bl.a. inspiration, motivation, form vs funktion och rollspelande uppkom. Slutsatsen var att det visuella utseendet har stor betydelse för spelare och bidrar till deras engagemang i spelet. Studien kan hjälpa spelutvecklare med att skapa spel med character creation som är uppskattade av spelare och ger dem en meningsfull upplevelse. / This study examines how the graphical aspects of character creation affects players and their involvement in single-player games. The purpose of the study is to investigate what significance the appearance of player created characters has to player commitment and whether it affects their gaming. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six participants where themes such as inspiration, motivation, form vs function and role playing arose. The conclusion was that the appearance of the player created character had a big significance for players and that it contributed to player involvement in the game. The study can help game developers create games with character creation which are appreciated by players and give them a meaningful experience.