The creative writing is preceded by a critical introduction that explores the history of the steampunk genre, the YA literature movement, and many novels and short stories in both genres. The critical introduction establishes genre guidelines and expectations, as well as provides examples for important qualities of the genre. The nature of the story required additional research into steam engines, WWI history, the RMS Olympic, tree climbing ascension techniques, and various other subjects. This informal research was used to improve the descriptions of technology in the creative work, as well as the naval terminology and battle tactics performed by steam powered ships before and during the first World War. Though not a historical novel, this information assists in building a believable steampunk world.

Die vorliegende Arbeit lässt sich dem Bereich der quantitativen Literaturanalyse zuordnen und verfolgt das Ziel, mittels computergestützter Verfahren zu untersuchen, inwieweit sich Romane hinsichtlich ihrer Figurenkonstellation ähneln. Dazu wird die Figurenkonstellation, als wichtiges strukturgebendes Ordnungsprinzip eines Romans, als soziales Netzwerk der Figuren operationalisiert. Solche Netzwerke können unter Anwendung von Verfahren des Natural Language Processing automatisch aus dem Text erstellt werden. Als Datengrundlage dient ein Korpus von deutschsprachigen Romanen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert, das mit automatischen Verfahren zur Figurenerkennung und Koreferenzauflösung prozessiert und manuell nachkorrigiert wurde, um eine möglichst saubere Datenbasis zu schaffen. Ausgehend von der intensiven vergleichenden Betrachtung der Figurenkonstellationen von Fontanes "Effi Briest" und Flauberts "Madame Bovary" wurde in einer manuell erstellten Distanzmatrix die menschliche Intuition solcher Ähnlichkeit zwischen allen Romanen des Korpus festgehalten, basierend auf der Lektüre von Zusammenfassungen der Romane. Diese Daten werden als Evaluationsgrundlage genutzt. Mit Hilfe von Methoden der sozialen Netzwerkanalyse können strukturelle Eigenschaften dieser Netzwerke als Features erhoben werden. Diese wurden anschließend zur Berechnung der Kosinusdistanz zwischen den Romanen verwendet. Obwohl die automatisch erstellten Netzwerke die Figurenkonstellationen der Romane im Allgemeinen gut widerspiegeln und die Netzwerkfeatures sinnvoll interpretierbar sind, war die Korrelation mit der Evaluationsgrundlage niedrig. Dies legt die Vermutung nahe, dass neben der Struktur der Figurenkonstellation auch wiederkehrende Themen und Motive die Erstellung der Evaluationsgrundlage unterbewusst beeinflusst haben. Daher wurde Topic Modeling angewendet, um wichtige zwischenmenschliche Motive zu modellieren, die für die Figurenkonstellation von Bedeutung sein können. Die Netzwerkfeatures und die Topic-Verteilung wurden in Kombination zur Distanzberechnung herangezogen. Außerdem wurde versucht, jeder Kante des Figurennetzwerks ein Topic zuzuordnen, das diese Kante inhaltlich beschreibt. Hier zeigte sich, dass einerseits Topics, die sehr spezifisch für bestimmte Texte sind, und andererseits Topics, die über alle Texte hinweg stark vertreten sind, das Ergebnis bestimmen, sodass wiederum keine, bzw. nur eine sehr schwache Korrelation mit der Evaluationsgrundlage gefunden werden konnte. Der Umstand, dass keine Verbindung zwischen den berechneten Distanzen und der Evaluationsgrundlage gefunden werden konnte, obwohl die einzelnen Features sinnvoll interpretierbar sind, lässt Zweifel an der Evaluationsmatrix aufkommen. Diese scheint stärker als zu Beginn angenommen unterbewusst von thematischen und motivischen Ähnlichkeiten zwischen den Romanen beeinflusst zu sein. Auch die Qualität der jeweiligen Zusammenfassung hat hier einen nicht unwesentlichen Einfluss. Daher wäre eine weniger subjektiv geprägte Möglichkeit der Auswertung von Nöten, beispielsweise durch die parallele Einschätzung mehrerer Annotatoren. Auch die weitere Verbesserung von NLP-Verfahren für literarische Texte in deutscher Sprache ist ein Desideratum für anknüpfende Forschungsansätze. / This thesis is a work in the field of Digital Literary Studies with the goal of computationally analyzing the similarity of novels with regard to their character constellation. The character constellation, as an important structural arrangement in a novel, is operationalized as a social network of these characters. Such networks can be generated automatically from a literary text using Natural Language Processing techniques. The work is based on a corpus of German novels of the 19th century that have been preprocessed using automatic methods of character identification and coreference resolution. The results have been manually corrected in order to ensure the best possible data quality. Starting from an intensive comparative contemplation of the character constellations in “Effi Briest” by Theodor Fontane and “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert, a distance matrix capturing the human intuition of similarity between character constellations of different novels was devised manually, based on summaries of the respective novels. This distance matrix serves as a means of evaluation. Using methods of social network analysis, structural properties of character networks can be modeled as features and used to compute cosine distances between the novels. The automatically generated networks are generally an adequate representation of the character constellations of the novels and the network features are meaningfully interpretable. Nevertheless, the correlation with the evaluation matrix was low. This raises the assumption that, apart from the structure of the character constellation, other properties such as recurring themes or motives may have subconsciously influenced the manual creation of the evaluation matrix. Therefore, topic modeling was used to represent important interpersonal motives that might be of importance for the character constellation. The network features and the topic distribution were used in combination for the computation of distances. Moreover, each edge in a character network was associated with a topic, trying to describe the kind of the relation. It could be observed that the result is heavily influenced on the one hand by topics that are very specific for a single text and on the other hand by topics featured strongly in all texts, so that, again, no or only a very weak correlation with the evaluation matrix could be found. The fact that there was no obvious relation between the computed distances and the manual distance matrix, even though the individual features are meaningfully interpretable, raises doubts about the evaluation matrix. It seems to be more strongly influenced by subconscious thematic and motivic similarities between the novels than assumed. The quality and extent of the respective summaries used in the creation of the manual matrix also have a substantial influence. Hence, a less subjective way of evaluation is needed, for example by parallel estimation of the distances by several annotators. Further improvement of the quality of NLP methods for literary texts in German is also a desideratum for following research.

Digital Immortality or Not?The aim of this thesis was to explore how we might be stewards for our post-life digital self after physical death, and to provide a new interaction experience in the form of a tangible, digital, or service design solution. Prior to the project kick-off secondary research, including academic research papers, analogous services, and existing projects, was distilled to form topical questions. These questions were then presented in many casual topical conversations and revealed that although post-life digital asset management awareness is increasing, little consideration exists on how to reflect legacies into the future long after death. A second stage of primary research included multiple on-site investigations, paired with in-person interviews and a quantitative online survey. Insights and understandings then lead to initial concepts that were tested to address distinctive qualities between tangible and digital design solutions. The main findings included that although people want to be remembered long after they die, current methods of tangible and digital content management can not sufficiently support the reflection of legacies long into the future. In conclusion, this thesis argues that to become part of an everlasting legacy, the interaction experience can leverage commonalities and shared moments from life events captured in digital media. These points of connections rely on associated metadata (i.e. keyword tags, date stamps, geolocation) to align relevant moments that transcend time and generations. The solution proposed here harnesses the benefits that both digital and tangible media afford and are presented as a tablet interface with an associated tangible token used as a connection key.

This dissertation examines the intersection between theories of body and of genre through the lens of cognitive science. It focuses, in particular, on representations of bodies in exemplars of fabliaux in Old French and Middle English, chivalric romance that feature the figure of Sir Gawain, and the Latin Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds. This dissertation establishes genre theory on cognitive-scientific ground by considering how embodied cognition influences both theories of genre and the representations of bodies. It argues that, rather than a container into which works fit, genre is a network of associations created in the minds of authors and audiences. This network finds expression in the bodies of characters, which differ across genres. It argues, moreover, that genre and bodies influence, in fundamental ways, interpretations of literary works. Finally, this work discusses the possibilities for future research using methods for quantitative textual analysis and data visualization common in the digital humanities. / text

This project examines the articulation of Mexican identities in digital narratives through a variety of genres, bringing into conversation various disciplines to present more comprehensive studies on the construction of representational paradigms, their consumption and social impact and their association with other cultural and literary texts. Deploying a multidisciplinary approach, this work articulates a theoretical framework that incorporates the fields of semiology, postcolonial theory, visual culture, urban studies, ludology, linguistic anthropology and border studies. This project analyzes the processes through which the identities of Mexican subjects and the depiction of Mexican spaces are articulated in new digital narratives in the form video games as mass culture objects, which are conceived from hegemonic loci of production, are globally consumed and have the potential to transmit deeply rooted social knowledge. Furthermore, the lack of spaces in which represented minorities may counter the stereotypical images projected forecloses dialogic processes. Through the agglomeration of different representational modules (visual units, narrative elements and linguistic portrayals) different genres impose predisposed rhetorical framework and found that the vast majority share a predetermined collection of elements that create a representational mosaic of how "Mexicanness" should be depicted and perceived. Furthermore, said digital subject representations enact cultural ideological frameworks that are imposed onto the audience, influencing meaning-formation processes. This work also analyzes the dynamics between the production, representation and consumption of videogames and traces tangents with the social and historical contexts of earlier visual media in Latin America.

The introduction of the Internet and the World Wide Web has been one the most significant developments of the last decade. Many historians have approached the Web with reluctance, hesitant to use it to conduct their traditional scholarly tasks of researching, publishing, and teaching history. Communication theorists such as Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan foretold many aspects of the Web’s impact in their analyses of past communication media. Applied to the Web, their ideas provide a deeper understanding of what a new medium of communication might mean for scholars in humanities disciplines. Indeed, in the last decade the term “Humanities Computing” has been coined to describe efforts to apply computer methods to humanities data. This thesis explores some of the processes and potential of Humanities Computing as it pertains to the presentation of primary documents on the Web. It takes the form of a case study using the correspondence of eighteenth-century Prince Edward Island land proprietor John MacDonald (1742-1810), a central figure in the conflict between the Island government and the land proprietors. MacDonald took an active interest in his land on the Island and became the voice of landowners making their case to the British crown. Digitized letters drawn from his correspondence will be featured on the Web as part of the Atlantic Canada Virtual Archives, making use of the Web as an alternative to print in presenting, analyzing, and interpreting history. The digitization of the MacDonald letters is an exercise in Humanities Computing through the application of current Web and digital technology to primary source material, which, in turn, demonstrates the benefits of doing research on the Web.

Cultural heritage digital libraries have become an important and prominent tool within humanities scholarship, offering increased expressive power for representing complex networks of relationships and the ability to use computational tools and interactive environments to help researchers ask new questions. While digital libraries offer tremendous advantages for publishing the final products of scholarship, in the words of Bradley and Vetch, "as they currently are delivered, do not intersect terribly meaningfully with the process of scholarly research." In this work I investigate how scholars use visually complex source documents-materials where access to a visual representation of the original object is required and present a prototype system, CritSpace designed to facilitate scholarly engagement with digital resources. Rather than creating a one-size-fits-all application, CritSpace is a web-based framework for building interactive visual interfaces that support scholarly use of digital libraries. The theory and design behind CritSpace is based on a formative study of the work practices of scholars from different disciplines and prior research in field of spatial hypertext. To illustrate a concrete example of using CritSpace and to evaluate its usefulness, I conclude with a case study that walks through the process of deploying CritSpace to support work in a specific scholarly domain, textual criticism and presents a summative usability study of the tool. The results of this study show that CritSpace is effective at supporting textual criticism. More significantly, they also indicate that the innovations added in CritSpace promote the intensive analysis of visual material in addition to knowledge organization and structuring.

This thesis delves into the surprisingly uniform treatment of the female character in comic storytelling, across all media, and will examine how this has evolved over time. It further explores what these changes represent for the stories, the characters, the creators, and the readers. The focus of the production aspects of this project is on the curation and development of a feminist perspective on comic books, their narrative and the industry that forms them. Looking at specific examples from historical and modern comics, as well as creative

Dating back to the dialectic between Socrates and Plato, innovative technologies have disrupted the traditions of discourse and created cultural divisions relevant to composition studies. These conversations are echoed in the Twentieth Century through the work of Melvin Kranzberg. Looking to the future, he sought to record the history of technology to maintain the constant upsurge of innovation. Like Kranzberg’s history of technology, the field of rhetoric and composition and this thesis seek to define technology and understand its value in order to navigate and interrogate effectively the deluge of twenty-first-century new media. Kranzberg—like many scholars in computers and composition—utilized various rhetorics to advocate for technological literacy despite its unpopularity in the academy.

As digital books begin to take center stage in our lives the importance of the old printed book still lingers on. A large number of the books printed on the paper media still have much to offer to readers for various reasons (e.g. less famous authors of prose, old books with interesting and original problems). To help individuals in digitizing and reusing their physical and digital books we decided to build a framework that will help people convert physical and digital books to other formats taking into consideration four dimensions: learning outcomes or methodology, target device characteristics, representation and the user. Our focus is on textbooks in history. Consequently, we do not consider some problems like math formulas. This work has the potential of helping people deal with the huge backlog of physical books that can become invisible as the digital books take off. To show that our platform can help in repurposing books for student study activities, we have developed some transformations. The transformations we have implemented shows that the framework can be used to add study aids to books, optimize books for a target platform (e-reader device and application combination), and supplement available features of a target platform and maintain consistency across various audio/visual devices and e-book formats. One of the important steps in the thesis was determining the study activities that we would support as examples in our implementation. We have chosen to implement support for the survey, question, read and review activities of the SQ3R reading technique. We have also implemented support for additional activities like search. The chosen activities and the support implemented for these activities are examples and are not meant to be complete. Another important decision point was to decide which target platforms (e-reader device and application combination) we need to support. We decided to choose a few representatives and leave the rest as future work. The target devices were selected so as to have a variety of device capabilities like screen size, display technology (e.g. e-ink, VGA), and user interaction styles (e.g. touch-based, button based) combined with application capabilities (e.g. audio only, visual only, audio visual, grayscale, and color). The devices selected were: iPad, iPod, iPhone, Kindle 3rd generation, Kindle Fire, Sony PRS and a laptop. The e-reader applications are the ones that are available for these devices.