In a field as old as Classics, it difficult to find truly innovative approaches to literary works that have been studied for millennia, and it only becomes more difficult to find something new to explore in works as fundamental to the field as Marcus Tullius Cicero’s. However, in the burgeoning field of Digital Humanities, new avenues for textual exploration arise even among the over-picked rubble that is the Classical World. Through the use of computer software, we can search through and statistically analyze corpora of massive sizes. This project uses such techniques to perform a mesoanalysis of Cicero’s corpus. Through the use of R and Gephi, I will “read” Cicero’s works from a distance and see a much broader view of his character than I could through a traditional close reading of a few texts. This mesoanalysis includes a stylometric analysis of Cicero’s entire corpus, a sentiment analysis of his orations, and a network analysis of his letters. The sentiment analysis will explore Cicero as a literary figure. Through a hierarchical cluster analysis in R, I will assess not only how his style changes from genre to genre but within a genre (orations) as well. That analysis will close with an exploration of the lexical richness of his works, how it varies from genre to genre and over his lifetime. For the sentiment analysis, I built a lexicon based on Stoic theory, primarily as it is explained in the Tusculunae Disputationes, and Robert Kaster’s work with emotional scripts. After the lexicon was built, I applied it to Cicero’s orations in a method similar to Matthew Jockers’ syuzhet package for R, and I traced his use of sentiment across the speech. I then compared those trajectories to Latin rhetorical theory, especially the theories included in Cicero’s own treatises, in order to see if Cicero had put into effect his own advice or if he had a few techniques that he kept hidden. The mesoanalysis closes with a network analysis of the Epistulae ad Familiares. I merged Cicero’s social network with a sentiment analysis in order to assess how Cicero felt about and interacted with his peers. From this analysis, one could gather an idea of Cicero as a person. At the end of the mesoanalysis, we can attain a much broader sense of Cicero’s character. This project also has a second aim, and that is to explain how these techniques could be applied to other literary corpora, outside of Cicero’s and Latin. I have carefully detailed my process and provide more instruction in my appendices so that readers could attempt these analyses and be successful in them.

This project is composed of two video games that look at multiple facets of the company Amazon through a critical lens. Fulfillment explores the working conditions of Amazon Fulfillment Centers through play. Amazon Invazion provides a critical look at the company from a consumer perspective, showcasing some of the many acquisitions made by Amazon from 1994-2018. Both games prompt the player to consider their own participation in the company’s growth.

This work presents an analysis of punctuation use in computer-mediated communication (CMC); in particular, the present study aims to describe the pragmatic functions of nonstandard punctuation on Twitter, providing a corpus-driven overview of the distribution and frequency of nonstandard punctuation use, and an analysis of sampled tweets at the individual tweet level to estimate noise levels in the overall corpus. A survey was also conducted which aimed to identify user understanding of the affective content of nonstandard punctuation strings and to identify any possible effects of character repetition. Survey results indicate that linguistic content was the strongest indicator of affective understanding, type of punctuation (i.e., ?, !, and combinations thereof) was a weaker indicator of some affective content, and repetition was not found to be significant. The study argues that certain string types, possibly defined by punctuation type and not count, have large indexical fields of pragmatic meaning available to them, which are bounded by context. In light of these observations, the study also proposes distinctions/categories of punctuation strings and their associated pragmatic meanings.

VS is a poetic exercise in rhyme and rhythm. An exercise attempting to camouflage ideas in humor, in song, in lyrical overtures, and in social media pop culture lingo to highlight the damaging effects technology and social media have on the human relationship with the earth. VS is a mirror, is an attempt to selfie the world we have lost touch with by contemplating where our role as caretakers for our planet lies. Through varying poetic forms, VS displays and critiques the limited perspective forced upon us when we socialize and experience life solely through phones and screens. In this manuscript, the speaker is fluid and mainly seen in the first person plural, or the collective, “we.” This voice includes the average media-driven American, as well as one who is considering how social media impacts their current lifestyles. In VS, the speaker represents various voices of faceless social media users who are separated from the physical world by the screens themselves and by digital avatars disguising further what is real. And yet, the speaker also represents a voiceless natural world—such as if it had the ability to forbid our modern ways of life from diminishing the world’s natural resources and curb further global pollution—while always questioning how these ways of life are being preserved on the physical land we live on and alongside.

ABSTRACT This article explores the nature of narrative in video games, and how it can be applied to the contemporary classroom to help teach literature and composition. Specifically, it is concerned with the idea of embodiment in video games. First proposed by theorist James Gee, embodiment is a word describing the phenomenon wherein a player inhabits the character that s/he plays. This article takes the idea of embodiment a step further, by introducing the idea of the embodied narrative, the idea that players do not only embody their characters, but those characters’ stories as well, and are composing unique, personal stories as they play. This article also explores the importance of narrative in teaching writing, as narrative and stories are fundamental to the ways in which we think and learn. It proposes that, because video games are a literary medium in which composition is actively taking place, they have the potential to be used in literature and composition classrooms alongside, or even in place of, more traditional methods of teaching. In addition, they can serve as an excellent way of integrating the study of narrative into the composition classroom.

Recent baseball scholarship has drawn attention to U.S. professional baseball’s complex twentieth century labor dynamics and expanding global presence. From debates around desegregation to discussions about the sport’s increasingly multicultural identity and global presence, the cultural politics of U.S. professional baseball is connected to the problem of baseball labor. However, most scholars address these topics by focusing on Major League Baseball (MLB), ignoring other teams and leagues—Minor League Baseball (MiLB)—that develop players for Major League teams. Considering Minor League Baseball is critical to understanding the professional game in the United States, since players who populate Major League rosters constitute a fraction of U.S. professional baseball’s entire labor force. As a digital humanities dissertation on baseball labor and globalization, this project uses digital humanities approaches and tools to analyze and visualize a quantitative data set, exploring how Minor League Baseball relates to and complicates MLB-dominated narratives around globalization and diversity in U.S. professional baseball labor. This project addresses how MiLB demographics and global dimensions shifted over time, as well as how the timeline and movement of foreign-born players through the Minor Leagues differs from their U.S.-born counterparts. This project emphasizes the centrality and necessity of including MiLB data in studies of baseball’s labor and ideological significance or cultural meaning, making that argument by drawing on data analysis, visualization, and mapping to address how MiLB labor complicates or supplements existing understandings of the relationship between U.S. professional baseball’s global reach and “national pastime” claims.

Multimodal writing refers to texts that use more than one communicative mode to convey information. While there is much scholarship that examines the history of alphabetic writing instruction and the alphabetic composing processes of students, little research explores the historical origins of multimodal composition and the processes in which students engage as they compose multimodal texts. This two-part project takes a fresh approach to studying multimodal writing by exploring the multimodal pedagogies of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric and writing teachers, analyzing the role of mental and physical images in modern writers’ composing practices, and investigating contemporary students’ processes for composing multimodal texts. In Part I, I re-imagine the history of multimodal writing by exploring the multimodal pedagogies that instructors of rhetoric and writing developed during Greek and Roman Antiquity, and I show how contemporary students use an array of multimodal composing processes that rely on both mental and physical images to write alphabetic text. In Part II, I share the results of a case study in which I investigate the processes students use to compose audio- and video-essays while enrolled in a multimodal writing course. This study explores what students know about multimodal writing before beginning the course, how they learn the software needed to compose these projects, the challenges students experience as they compose, and the similarities and differences students perceive between their own processes for composing alphabetic and multimodal texts. Ultimately, I argue that composition teachers must acknowledge our long history of teaching with multimodal pedagogies and our experience composing alphabetic text through multimodal processes. Recognizing this lengthy history will decrease the anxiety that many composition teachers experience when tasked with teaching multimodal writing because, while typically only time and experience can grow confidence, in this case, a recognition of how much we already know will allow us to teach with the self-assurance we have earned.

This thesis examines narrative representation of female characters in video games and how game narratives and representations contribute to socio-cultural discourse. First, this thesis explores and defines the cultural background for female representation in video games. It then defines video games as a type of text and describes the features that are unique to games, such as the use of avatars, and what impacts these features have on game narratives. The thesis attempts to establish evidence of an evolutionary arc of comprehensive female representation in video games by first exploring historical female narrative tropes, and then comparing them to narrative case studies of female characters within five recent game titles (Tomb Raider, Bayonetta, Dragon Age, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and Horizon: Zero Dawn). In these case studies, the implications for their representations of female characters are analyzed in the context of socio-cultural discourse. Furthermore, this thesis argues for the importance of diverse representation within video games as a form of media, and as cultural objects that contribute to social discourse.

Virtual reality (VR), an emergent technology, affords experiential content delivery in education by evoking emotive responses in users, which can be prohibitive via traditional media. This thesis explores VR for the development of grit – passion and perseverance, which are essential characteristics in education and long-term success. The research proposes design strategies to stimulate senses for emotional engagement and a physiological response. In the project, two interactive environments position the user in emotional states to build passion and perseverance. To develop passion, the virtual world is designed to engage in creativity using 3D-spatial audio and visual effects. In contrast, to build perseverance users are exposed to a challenging environment that requires them to overcome and positively associate frustration with growth. This thesis demonstrates the potential of design for higher sense-stimulation applied through VR in education.

Far from vanishing as romantically predicted, Native being remains present despite centuries’ efforts of erasure. Far from empty space or a blank page, the state of Oklahoma has always been and continues to be a site of transcultural negotiations. Native playwrights unghost—make visible—those shimmering glimmers when they re-present historical events. Centering the work of Native playwrights from Oklahoma-as-Indian-Territory, I in turn unghost—recover—the connections between historical crises dramatized by Native poets and playwrights and reenacted by historical interpreters in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with nineteenth century archives and circulations. I elucidate a new genealogy of Oklahoma-as-Indian-Territory, where borders bend in genre, time, and space. The Native plays here share a time-weaving relationship to earlier historical crises, a resistance to false closure, a recycling of time-worn stereotypes in the service of their undoing. Unghosting Native playwrights can mean reviving those who have fallen out of print, as with Red Renaissance prodigy Hanay Geiogamah, and reclaiming those whose Native identity has been erased, as with Lynn Riggs, whose Green Grow the Lilacs became the largely unsung foundation of the musical Oklahoma!, as well as expanding the dramatic archive to capture plays only found online. My first chapter, “Staking Claims on Mixed-Blood Inheritance,” draws upon performance theorists Diana Taylor and Rebecca Schneider’s work in transcultural written and bodily archives to investigate two key repeated performances: the statehood mock wedding and the Land Run reenactments recently discontinued by the Oklahoma City Public Schools but still celebrated annually by schoolchildren across the state. Juxtaposing them with commemorative poetic performances by Diane Glancy, N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, and LeAnne Howe, I situate these performances not as quirky local fun but as rituals of systemic colonial representational power. My second chapter, “Active States,” unghosts folk drama through Lynn Riggs’ pre-statehood play Green Grow the Lilacs and the collaboratively revised Trail of Tears outdoor spectacle produced for decades by the Cherokee Nation, including the extended material performances of these texts in playbills, a songbook, and a fine press illustrated edition. My third chapter, “Kitchen Table Worlds in Motion: Collaborations in Native New Play Development” examines four recent plays and the development institutions that support them, all breaking new ground in form yet recycling images and adapting texts and experiences from many archives: Hanay Geiogamah’s Foghorn, LeAnne Howe’s The Mascot Opera: A Minuet, Diane Glancy’s Pushing the Bear, and Joy Harjo’s Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. My fourth and final chapter continues the exploration of recent work, yet on specific policy issues: the stolen bodies of residential schools and of looted funerary remains, and the ongoing repercussions of these instances of cultural genocide in courts and heritage sites today, as dramatized by Mary Kathryn Nagle and Suzan Shown Harjo in My Father’s Bones, Annette Arkeketa in Ghost Dance, and N. Scott Momaday’s in The Moon in Two Windows.