Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item SMALL, SLOW AND STEADY: ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF ARTS DISTRICT DESIGNATION AND ARTS-LED DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES ON ENTERPRISE GROWTH IN A SMALL, MID-ATLANTIC TOWN(2021) Manjarrez, Carlos Arturo; Howland, Marie; Urban and Regional Planning and Design; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Researchers and planning professionals have become increasingly interested in leveraging arts and culture programming and investments as strategies for community revitalization. Arts-themed strategies employed by local governments and community organizations include arts and music festivals, commissioning public art, physical development of cultural facilities, artist live/work spaces and more. As these practices expanded in the early 2000s, local actors began concentrating arts-led development activities in designated “arts districts. Many of these new districts received their designation from state agencies hoping to bolster tourism, support local business, and attract artists, knowledge economy workers and creative industries. Despite their impressive growth, evidence of arts district effects on local economies is limited. Past research has focused narrowly on single sites, without the benefit of controlled comparisons, or has pooled many different arts districts into the same model, ignoring the unique effects of the different arts-led development strategies they employ. This project offers a middle ground, one that combines quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the impact of arts district designation and programming on business enterprise growth. The primary focus of the project is Frederick, Maryland, a small city 43 miles northwest of DC, which received formal recognition from the State of Maryland in 2002. The first part of the project uses the Synthetic Control Method to compare the enterprise growth rate of the Frederick arts district to that of a statistically-derived, synthetic comparison unit over a 20 year time period. Frederick's business growth rate was found to be significantly larger than its synthetic counterpart, and enjoyed a more robust recovery after the Great Recession. The second part of the analysis employs a site-based qualitative analysis of interviews, local media and administrative records, and an analysis of visitorship using a unique dataset derived from the cell phone location data. Triangulating findings from these different sources provides a more robust basis of evidence to assess arts district impacts, detailing the ways in which arts-based development efforts, concentrated in narrowly targeted areas, can result in significant business enterprise growth in small communities.Item The Novelty Search of Prior Art Requires a Lawyer(2013) Earnhart, Mark Leslie; Sham, Foon V; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Thesis: THE NOVELTY SEARCH OF PRIOR ART REQUIRES A LAWYER Mark Earnhart, Masters of Fine Art, 2013 Thesis Directed By: Professor Foon Sham Department of Art "Things are complicated" is a very true statement in which the vagueness is fitting, the utterance reprehensible and the implications impossible. But, things are complicated. They are not simply objects, although they might take the form; they might have mass and volume, substance and presence. But the object is tied to the act of perception, the thing is not; the thing can exist in no physical way but still maintain presence. What happens when encountering a thing? Does one rely on the tools of perception solely? Or is there something immeasurable in combination with what is present? Encountering a thing requires an ability to make connections, relate personally and internalize the situation. If the thing is known we put to work a relation of familiarity and if unknown the mechanism required for retrieval becomes infinitely complex.