UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item HOW THE PICTURE PRESS MADE AMERICA: NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION(2023) Yotova, Denitsa H; Moeller, Susan D.; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation looks at the related ways in which two pioneering news photographicagencies depicted the American self and presented an “understanding” of America’s nationhood. First, this dissertation investigates Bain News Service between 1900 and 1920 and the concurrent industrialization and technological achievements that changed the nature of photography and mass communication. It considers Bain’s agency as an influential national institution and gatekeeper of visual information that, along with newspaper publishers, determined the flow of photographic representation both at home and abroad. Second, this dissertation examines in parallel terms the VII agency from its inception in 2001 to 2020––a period defined by globalization, digitalization, and media convergence. VII, as a decentralized global entity, competed with a multitude of producers and consumers to influence the social discourse. The findings of this dissertation illuminate the power, and recent loss thereof, of news photographs to make visible and to promote specific social discourses within the functions of news photo agencies. In investigating Bain News Service, the first commercial news photo service in the United States founded in 1895, and the VII Photo agency, one of the preeminent photo agencies in the digital era founded in 2001, the dissertation considers how changes in the news business and photographic technologies altered representational practices and the sharing of visual information globally. This dissertation traces the rapidly evolving economic and technological environment across the century — two trends which together have not only contributed to the diminishing authority of the news photographic agency as an institution, but have weakened news photography’s role in promoting and sustaining a national identity and a nation’s reputation. Centralized national news photographic agencies of the early twentieth century, such as Bain News Service, dominated visual representations in the press. The Bain agency provided images of the United States that promoted the sovereign national status quo and disseminated images of the nation aligned with the ideology of the country’s political elite. One hundred years later, photo agencies including VII, operate in a globally-oriented, citizen-driven public sphere. The photographs disseminated by VII serve to challenge the American national status quo; they were (and still are) taken and often published in the hopes that the images will (help) bring social change. Guided by Stuart Hall’s concept of the politics of representation, this dissertation traces the evolution of the news photo agency, as a journalistic institution, while specifically examining news images along with ideologies embedded in them. The dissertation also considers the news photo agency as an Althusserian Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)–– a system separate from the government, but indirectly involved in the expression of dominant ideologies and the promotion of a particular social discourse. To assess the significance of the news photo agency as an institution, and the ways in which it represented “Americanness,” this dissertation uses several approaches, including discourse and historiographical analyses and a photo-thematic analysis of the archives of Bain News Service and VII Photo. In analyzing the construction of American social discourse, the following questions guided the research: How do news photographs and the news photo agencies as journalistic institutions help represent/promote social discourses? How have Bain News Service and VII represented “Americanness” in their news photographs? How are ideas and ideologies of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream visualized in these photographs? How does the representation of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream differ in twentieth-century images produced by Bain compared to the twenty-first-century images produced by VII? Through thematic and visual examinations of news photographs of the American nation, as produced by Bain News Service and VII Photo respectively, this dissertation also looks at representations of American exceptionalism, nationalism, and the American Dream over time to determine the visual dialogue within the United States and between the American nation and the rest of the world. This investigation finds photographic representations of America’s greatness took an important place in the news and for the news photo agencies of the early 1900s, creating a highly specific understanding of the American nation as a rising global power. The centralization of image production under the news photo agencies of the twentieth century also determined a specific meaning of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream in line with the nation’s leadership. With the advent of newer technologies in the twenty-first century, the public also began to take on an active role in the producing and distributing of representations of the American individual and nation, resulting in the waning authority of the news photo agency. The decentralization of image production that resulted from forces such as convergence, digitalization, globalization, and citizen (photo)journalism in the twenty-first century has, in turn, complicated and visually re-defined the meaning of nationalism, exceptionalism, and the American Dream. Moreover, news photographic representations of social inequalities, environmental issues, and political divisions that proliferate across the Internet and social media in the twenty-first century have altered the visual portrait of America’s reputation and the ways global audiences “see” the United States. The examination of the business, structure, and news photographs produced by the two innovative news photo agencies set a century apart illuminates the significance of the news photo agency at large. The investigations outlined in the chapters ahead clarify how photojournalistic institutions have shaped public knowledge about a nation and its ideological values.Item "I love that they exist, even if imperfectly:" Disability, Music Archives, Descriptive Language, and Symbolic Annihilation(2023) Pineo, Elizabeth; Marsh, Diana E; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawing on scholarship that addresses symbolic annihilation, this thesis brings together three related studies to argue that music archivists need to address the symbolic annihilation of Disabled individuals within their materials. It offers an assessment of the current state of representation of Disabled individuals in music and non-music archives (chapter 2) and in Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) (chapter 3). From there, it explores the ways in which music and non-music archives are perceived by Disabled individuals with ties to music (chapter 4). Following the presentation of these three studies, the thesis relates combined implications, considerations for further research, and suggestions for methods archivists might use to combat symbolic annihilation and its underlying causes. The author provides practical steps for combatting symbolic annihilation of Disabled individuals throughout, but the final chapter (chapter 5) focuses exclusively on this topic.Item Enabling Graph Analysis Over Relational Databases(2019) Xirogiannopoulos, Konstantinos; Deshpande, Amol; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Complex interactions and systems can be modeled by analyzing the connections between underlying entities or objects described by a dataset. These relationships form networks (graphs), the analysis of which has been shown to provide tremendous value in areas ranging from retail to many scientific domains. This value is obtained by using various methodologies from network science-- a field which focuses on studying network representations in the real world. In particular "graph algorithms", which iteratively traverse a graph's connections, are often leveraged to gain insights. To take advantage of the opportunity presented by graph algorithms, there have been a variety of specialized graph data management systems, and analysis frameworks, proposed in recent years, which have made significant advances in efficiently storing and analyzing graph-structured data. Most datasets however currently do not reside in these specialized systems but rather in general-purpose relational database management systems (RDBMS). A relational or similarly structured system is typically governed by a schema of varying strictness that implements constraints and is meticulously designed for the specific enterprise. Such structured datasets contain many relationships between the entities therein, that can be seen as latent or "hidden" graphs that exist inherently inside the datasets. However, these relationships can only typically be traversed via conducting expensive JOINs using SQL or similar languages. Thus, in order for users to efficiently traverse these latent graphs to conduct analysis, data needs to be transformed and migrated to specialized systems. This creates barriers that hinder and discourage graph analysis; our vision is to break these barriers. In this dissertation we investigate the opportunities and challenges involved in efficiently leveraging relationships within data stored in structured databases. First, we present GraphGen, a lightweight software layer that is independent from the underlying database, and provides interfaces for graph analysis of data in RDBMSs. GraphGen is the first such system that introduces an intuitive high-level language for specifying graphs of interest, and utilizes in-memory graph representations to tackle the problems associated with analyzing graphs that are hidden inside structured datasets. We show GraphGen can analyze such graphs in orders of magnitude less memory, and often computation time, while eliminating manual Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) effort. Second, we examine how in-memory graph representations of RDBMS data can be used to enhance relational query processing. We present a novel, general framework for executing GROUP BY aggregation over conjunctive queries which avoids materialization of intermediate JOIN results, and wrap this framework inside a multi-way relational operator called Join-Agg. We show that Join-Agg can compute aggregates over a class of relational and graph queries using orders of magnitude less memory and computation time.Item From Karbala to Qādesiyyeh: the Spectacle of Arab “Other” in Persianate and Parsi Literary Traditions(2017) Jamshidi, Abbas; Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad; Richardson, Brian; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In early decades of the twentieth century, a distinct anti-Arab discourse emerged in modern Persianate literature. A complex process of identification and disidentification of self and “otherness” came to cast them as the “other” of the Persianate people who are represented as occupying a higher standing on an imaginary evolutionary scheme. While this view faced strong competing discourses in the 1960s and 1970, prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution, it did not fade completely. The present dissertation argues that the emergence of antiquarianism in Iran and its neighboring cultures in the nineteenth century, and a growing Shi’i conceptualization of “otherness,” underlined the discourse that recast the Arabs as destroyers of Iran’s antiquities. As the title of this project indicates, two traumatic moments define the range of materials examined here. “From Karbala to Qādesiyyeh” tries to demonstrate how the mutable image of the “other” in some Persianate literary environments historically has gone through certain changes where religious conceptualizations of self and “other” were displaced by ethnic ones. Examples of early Shiʿi poetry and performative practices like taʿziyeh performances and cursing rituals are sites where in Chapter One I examine the identity of this religious “other” as it ambivalently consisted of Omayyad Arabs, Ottoman Turks and Uzbeks. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, this ambivalence was reduced in favor of an ethnic “other” who was resolved to destroy not Iran’s Shiʿi faith but the Persian “nation.” This was when the emergent ideology of modern Persian nationalism replaced Shiʿi-Sunni paradigms of self and “otherness” with tropes and discourses derived from colonial sciences of archaeology and anthropology. As a result, the newly conceptualized Arab “other” no longer came from the battle of Karbala (680 CE) which is a foundational moment for the Shiʿi faith; instead, he came from the battle of Qādesiyyeh (636 CE) which marked the downfall of the Sasanian Empire and the advent of Islam in Iran. The career of renowned modern writer, Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951), tends to epitomize this epistemological shift. As a preamble to my study of Hedayat, in Chapter Two, I briefly investigate the emergence of antiquarianism in nineteenth-century Iran in the works of revolutionary poet, Mirzādeh ʿEshqi (1894-1924). I argue that ʿEshqi’s romantic reception of Iran’s antiquities, especially the Ctesiphon ruins where the remains of the Sasanian past could be seen, was a watershed moment for the formation of an antiquarian discourse in modern Persian literature. This was when ʿEshqi transplanted “footsteps of a barefooted Arab” at the Ctesiphon ruins in an effort to restore the latter’s agency as the purported destroyer of Iran’s pre-Islamic glories. As I argue in Chapter Three, Hedayat transformed ʿEshqi’s imaginary encounter with the Arab “other” into a political theatre where presumptions about the inferiority of Arab material culture, especially their uncouth appearance and humble source of subsistence, function as the armature of the evolutionary discourse he directs at them. Hedayat’s appropriation of the findings of European sciences of archaeology and anthropology –popular among elite circles in Iran in 1920s and 1930s – tends to frame his representations of Arabs as some “primitive” people attacking a superior Persian civilization. The racial anthropological underpinnings of his writings reached an unprecedented level when in one of his satirical works, he paraded the Arabs in a human zoo (ethnological exhibition) in Berlin supposedly to expose their “barbarous” deeds and creeds. By submitting the Arabs to the category of “savages,” Hedayat mobilized the pernicious tropes and discourses of certain colonial exhibitions where Africans and “Orientals” were put on display in Europe as signifiers of alterity. In Chapter Four, I argue that certain colonial elites in the Indo-Persian community of India, known as the Parsis, played a vital role in fostering the absorption of colonial sciences of archaeology and anthropology in the elite discourses of history and literature in nineteenth-century Iran. Examining the writings of Manekji Limji Hataria (1813–1890), the well-known emissary who was sent from Mumbai to Iran to improve the lives of its Zoroastrian community, can shed light on how the image of Arabs as “uncivilized” destroyers of Iran’s ancient glories was discursively manufactured by projecting onto them the very practices Hataria observed among contemporary Persians when it came to failing to protect their country’s ancient heritage. The Parsi texts examined here capture a vibrant interplay between age-old Persian concepts, and tropes and discourses they borrowed from European colonial literature. Exploring the intertextual continuities we find between the two traditions can offer fascinating comparative insight into the polyphony of voices that animates the Persianate literature in its trans-regional reach.Item A Better Place to Be: Republicanism as an Alternative to the Authoritarianism-Democracy Dichotomy(2016) Binetti, Christopher; Alford, Charles F; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: A BETTER PLACE TO BE: REPUBLICANISM AS AN ALTENATIVE TO THE AUTHORITARIANISM-DEMOCRACY DICHOTOMY Christopher Ronald Binetti, Doctor of Philosophy, and 2016 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Charled Frederick Alford, Department of Government and Politics In this dissertation, I argue that in modern or ancient regimes, the simple dichotomy between democracies and autocracies/dictatorships is both factually wrong and problematic for policy purposes. It is factually wrong because regimes between the two opposite regime types exist and it is problematic because the either/or dichotomy leads to extreme thinking in terms of nation-building in places like Afghanistan. In planning for Afghanistan, the argument is that either we can quickly nation-build it into a liberal democracy or else we must leave it in the hands of a despotic dictator. This is a false choice created by both a faulty categorization of regime types and most importantly, a failure to understand history. History shows us that the republic is a regime type that defies the authoritarian-democracy dichotomy. A republic by my definition is a non-dominating regime, characterized by a (relative) lack of domination by any one interest group or actor, mostly non-violent competition for power among various interest groups/factions, the ability of factions/interest groups/individual actors to continue to legitimately play the political game even after electoral or issue-area defeat and some measure of effectiveness. Thus, a republic is a system of government that has institutions, laws, norms, attitudes, and beliefs that minimize the violation of the rule of law and monopolization of power by one individual or group as much as possible. These norms, laws, attitudes, and beliefs ae essential to the republican system in that they make those institutions that check and balance power work. My four cases are Assyria, Persia, Venice and Florence. Assyria and Persia are ancient regimes, the first was a republic and then became the frightening opposite of a republic, while the latter was a good republic for a long time, but had effectiveness issues towards the end. Venice is a classical example of a medieval or early modern republic, which was very inspirational to Madison and others in building republican America. Florence is the example of a medieval republic that fell to despotism, as immortalized by Machiavelli’s writings. In all of these examples, I test certain alternative hypotheses as well as my own.Item Public Opinion, Political Representation, and Democratic Choice(2015) Zenz, Michael; Pacuit, Eric; Morris, Christopher W; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I argue that political representatives have duties to be responsive to public opinion in their policy decisions. The existence of this duty, I claim, is a basic requirement of a truly democratic system of government. In chapter 2, I show that several standard versions of democratic legitimacy require political representatives to ``respect'' public opinion. However, I argue that a particular version of political legitimacy, based upon popular sovereignty and the importance of self-governance, provides an especially useful background for understanding what this ``respect'' must mean. In chapter 3, I argue that respecting public opinion requires political representatives to integrate public opinion information into their policy decisions. According to one of the standard views of political representation, the liberal conception, representatives deciding between policy alternatives should balance what they believe to be in the interests of the public against public opinion. I argue that this is the only adequate theory of political representation. Although this view of political representation is often discussed in the literature, it is less often given a mathematically precise form. Therefore, I present a formal model of such a balancing procedure, and this reveals several important formal requirements that a conception of public opinion must satisfy; most importantly, it must account for instability in the expression of public opinion, individual differences in opinion strength, and it must be representable along a cardinal scale. Standard measures of public opinion do not satisfy these requirements. I argue that if such a model of public opinion cannot be formulated, then the liberal conception of political representation is incoherent. In chapters 4 and 5, I present a model of public opinion based upon Thurstonian scaling techniques that fulfills the necessary formal requirements. Finally, in chapter 6, I discuss several important implications this model has for the measurement of public opinion, the use of public opinion by political representatives in policy deliberation, and other problems in social choice theory.Item Infants' representations and memories of their social-emotional interactions(2013) Sherman, Laura Jernigan; Cassidy, Jude; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)According to several theorists, infants form mental representations and memories of their social-emotional interactions (e.g., Bowlby, 1969/1982), but very few studies have investigated these claims. Across two studies, I hypothesized that 10-month-old infants would form representations and memories of their social-emotional interactions. In Study 1, infants (N = 24) were familiarized to a positive and negative puppet and their representations and memories were assessed with visual-paired comparison (VPC) and forced-choice tests. Ten minutes after their interactions, but not immediately after, significantly more infants chose the positive puppet (17/24, p = .030). To better understand these results, I conducted another study in which infants (N = 32) were randomly assigned to be familiarized to either a positive and neutral puppet or a negative and neutral puppet. In the positive condition infants were more likely to choose the positive puppet immediately after (12/16, p =.038), but not 10 minutes after the interactions, whereas in the negative condition infants' choices were at chance - but older infants were more likely choose the neutral puppet (Mdiff = 11.50 days, p = .022). In both studies, no effects emerged with infants' preferential looking. Overall, the results indicated that infants' representations and memories of their brief social-emotional interactions were stronger for positive than negative interactions. Results are discussed with regard to existing theory and research and the negativity bias hypothesis.Item Electoral Systems and Representation: the Effects of District Magnitude(2013) Taylor, Jeffrey Alan; Herrnson, Paul S.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)District magnitude (the number of representatives elected from a district) influences the strategies legislators adopt to build and maintain electoral security. In comparison to single member districts (SMDs), representatives in multimember districts (MMDs) compete for votes alongside a large set of candidates, and often share a party affiliation with other candidates competing for one of many available seats in the same district. This project sheds new light on the effects of district magnitude on the political careers of elected representatives and the nature of representation provided by a legislature. Utilizing a unique data set of campaign and legislative behavior in conjunction with personal interviews of current state legislators in four states, I find that those elected in MMDs build and maintain electoral support differently from those in SMDs. Specifically, I find that district magnitude influences the way candidates interact on the campaign trail, attention to local governments and organized interests, the degree to which representatives specialize, and the balance of power in the legislative chamber. The results have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between electoral systems and democratic representation, and suggest that many long-standing assumptions regarding the influence of district magnitude on elite political behavior may be in need of revision.Item On the Representation of Objects in the Visual System(2012) Kirilov, Dimiter Iavorov; Rey, Georges; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There is evidence in the psychological literature for representations of objects (Pylyshyn's visual indexes) that refer to and track, not properties, but what in our sort of world typically turn out to be individual physical objects. I am concerned with how such representations acquire their content. Two strategies for accounting for the content of representations are a) representations of particulars refer to the entity that caused them; and b) representations of particulars refer to the entity whose properties are represented by the visual system. The first strategy faces the "which link" problem: since any one of the links in the causal chain leading to the token representation counts as a cause of the token representation, no particular link is individuated as the referent. I examine a recent proposed solution to this problem (Fodor's counterfactual triangulation) and conclude that it fails to determine whether the referent of a visual index is an object, as opposed to a state of affairs, or an event. The problems with the first strategy are a reason to explore the second strategy: representations of objects refer to the entity whose properties are represented by the visual system. I adopt Fodor's asymmetric dependency account (ADA) of intentionality to account for how representations of properties get their content. Fodor's account is chosen not because it is free of problems, but because it has the structure of a theory that promises to deal with many of the classic problems that befall informational semantics (e.g. the disjunction problem). Since ADA is designed to work for causal relations between properties and not for causal relations between particulars, it cannot, by itself, account for how representations of particulars get their content. So I suggest that ADA be supplemented with conceptual role semantics to account for the logico-syntactic roles of representations of particulars. In particular, I suggest that to represent objects the visual system requires the capacity to form and store in memory definite descriptions containing: a) predicates referring to spatio-temporal relations; and b) temporal indexicals.Item Representation(s): A Mutable Process for a Transitioning Urban Landscape(2009) LaCharite-Lostritto, Lisa; Ambrose, Michael; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)To understand the medium is to understand the affects the medium has on the changes and the scale and form of human association and action over time, not only as the medium is being introduced, but also the unconscious and unforeseeable effects the cultural matrix within which the medium operates. Marshall McLuhan Difference is not simply the collapsing [or circulation] of identity, it is also the rendering of space and time as fragmented, transformable, interpenetrated, beyond any fixed formulation, no longer guaranteed by the a priori or by the universalisms of science. Elizabeth Grosz Media can be leveraged as a way to evaluate and inform the built environment. By using media as more than just a communicative necessity, media is capable of directing process. This process seeks to construct a representational framework and narrative through the investigation and translation of cultural, historical, and conceptual contexts. Architecture, as media, functions as a perceptual tool toward the fusion of process and a meta-physical and physical experience. This thesis asks the question: How can these complex contexts create a framework within which the media operates and informs the built environment? The validity of this research in the context of the culture of architectural education is to show that architecture is more than simply applied knowledge and skills translated through conventions of visual communication. Architecture is a way of seeing and thinking that requires understanding of media beyond the idea of tool and production to an idea of performance, process, and methodology.