Common wiki applications lack possibilities to structure the relationships between wiki pages. This paper presents a semantic wiki prototype named SHAWN that allows modelling concepts and their relationships within a wiki environment. One goal of this prototype is to keep concept creation very simple. Yet, entering relationship data instantaneously gratifies the user with enhanced navigational means on the wiki. The engine supports simple semantic queries upon the emergent model. A challenge is to accommodate a self-explaining query interface for these ontologies.

Revising Yeats's rhetorical question, this dissertation asks: "How can we tell the dancer from the music?" In the early twentieth century Isadora Duncan and her barefoot protégées initiated a performance tradition that would later be recognized as American modern dance. They did this, to a great extent, by embodying European "absolute music." Soon, however, choreographers and dancers of this new art form faced modernist calls for medium-specific "absolute dance" that would express movement's autonomy and not the autonomous music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. As John Martin, one of the nation's first dance critics, wrote in 1933, "There is a long, sad story to be told about the use of music for dancing which was never intended to be danced to." Today that story is even longer; contra Martin, it is not sad. As the use of classical music was a primary component in the earliest forms of "free dance" and as it remains in some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful modern dance today, this use is in need of critical and historical attention. Tracing an alternative genealogy from Duncan's then-scandalous embodied empathy with sacralized art music, the central chapters of this study of the use of music in American modern dance focus on the lives, works, and reception of two choreographers: Ted Shawn and Merce Cunningham. Both of these men founded his own dance company and created works where choreomusicality, or the relationship between music and dance, remained especially vital. For Shawn, wishing to go even further than Duncan, this meant creating choreographies where dance followed the music as closely as possible. Indeed, in his "music visualizations" (a term that he coined with his wife and colleague Ruth St. Denis) his goal was to create dances that were perfect translations of the music itself. Such translation is ultimately impossible, and in attempting it, I argue, Shawn ended up revealing more of himself--specifically, his desire to perform a non-conventional masculinity that he normally felt was off-limits--than he did of the music. Reacting against this tradition--the standard history of modern dance goes--was Merce Cunningham, in whose mature choreographies music and dance are united only by their overall duration. Yet Cunningham, under the influence of Cage, created several dances to the music of Satie that provide an illuminating exception to this practice. I focus in particular on Idyllic Song (1944) and Second Hand (1970), both of which Cunningham choreographed to Satie's Socrate. Though created during his artistic maturity, Second Hand provides a link to the earliest self-expressive collaborations with John Cage. As a result, this choreography offers an unusual window into the Cage-Cunningham personal and professional relationship. In examining Shawn's and Cunningham's choreography, this dissertation tracks not only the changing role of Western art music in the relatively young art form of modern dance but also examines these choreographers' responses to contemporary attitudes toward the male dancer, unconventional masculinities, and the relatively new identity of the homosexual. In doing so I demonstrate how the choreomusicalities of these men reflected and refracted their masculinities and homosexualities. In addition to providing choreomusical analysis and interpretation, I revise current understandings of both specific scores and choreographies through intensive archival research (from silent films of Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, which I have synchronized with their unheard music, to Cage-Cunningham manuscripts ignored or previously thought lost), observation of live and recorded rehearsals and performances, and interviews. Ultimately, "The Dancer from the Music" seeks to establish choreomusicality as an exemplary lens through which to view the meeting of music's ineffability with the realities and identities of listening and performing bodies in motion.

Thesis advisor: Andrew Prevot / This dissertation seeks to contribute to the discipline of theological anthropology by engaging the histories, writings, and aesthetic contributions of women within the African diaspora. In particular, the dissertation crafts an approach to analyzing the concept of the imago dei in relation to the experiences of flesh, bones, land, and sea that have shaped Black women’s poetics, theory, and praxis in the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. Womanist approaches to theology often center Black women’s lived experiences and literature as resources for religious inquiry. Decolonial scholarship tends to critique the remnants of colonialism in the present, imagining futures beyond hegemonic categories. As a methodological contribution, this dissertation combines insights from womanist theology and decolonial thought, identifying M. Shawn Copeland and Sylvia Wynter as major interlocutors with each respective discipline. This dissertation questions what it might mean for humanity to image God, especially after the dual crises of colonialism and slavery. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Construction zones can greatly affect the traffic flow on roadways, especially when lane closures are required. Traditionally, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) has used traffic management specifications that only allow lane closures and road work to be done during predetermined hours or specifications that require a certain number of lanes to be open at all times. Recently, mobility-based work-zone traffic flow maintenance has been considered. This method requires continuous monitoring of mobility-based performance data and a mechanism to send alerts to the contractors when the mobility data does not meet the standards set by the specifications. UDOT recently tested mobility-based performance specifications at an urban arterial work zone and studied issues related to implementation of mobility-based performance specifications. Parallel to this experiment, UDOT funded a study to develop guidelines for implementing mobility-based performance specifications to manage traffic flow in work zones. Dynamically collecting mobility-based data such as travel time and speed is now feasible using technologies such as Bluetooth and microwave sensors. The core benefit of using mobility-based performance specifications is that they can give the contractor more flexibility in construction work scheduling while maintaining an acceptable level of traffic flow. If the level of traffic flow is not maintained, then the contractor is assessed a financial penalty. The penalty is determined by the amount of time where the flow is not maintained at a predetermined condition. To discuss issues and develop guidelines, a task force consisting of UDOT representatives, several representatives from the construction industry, and researchers from Brigham Young University was formed. Through three task force meetings, a set of 12 guidelines were developed, including guidelines about when mobility-based performance specifications should be used and which mobility data should be used. Some of the issues were difficult for the task force members to agree on, and a decision-making theory called the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) was used to find best approaches to deal with some of the difficult issues associated with the implementation of mobility-based performance specifications in highway construction contracts. These guidelines should be reviewed as appropriate in the future as UDOT accumulates experience in using these types of specifications.