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 Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination(2022) Moro, Jeffrey; Kirschenbaum, Matthew G; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Atmospheric media are techniques and technologies for the rationalization of air. They take many forms, from the meteorological media of weather maps and satellites, to the infrastructural media of ventilation and climate control, to the embodied media of the breath. This dissertation explores these atmospheric media as fundamental conduits for the cultural work of managing the air, and in turn, for managing climatological catastrophe. Through readings of diverse media objects, from electronic literature and science fiction to 3D printers to air conditioning in data centers, “Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination” argues that scientists, artists, and laypeople alike have come to imagine the air as a computer, one that they might program as a way out of environmental crisis. Braiding interdisciplinary insights from environmental media studies, literary studies, and the digital humanities, this dissertation explores how computation smooths over atmospheric difference with the standardization of data, and in doing so, further imperils our shared skies.Item Transversal Media: Power, Peril, and Potential in the Ever-Expanding 3D Multiverse(2021) Bauer, DB; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Transversal media move. They move with ease across a variety of interfaces, communities of practice, and applications. With highly compatible file formats, they move across a multitude of 3D-friendly devices, like virtual reality, holograms, and augmented reality projections, and now with the 3D printer, can enter the physical world, more often than not, as plastic. Transversal technologies, like 3D scanning and computer-aided design (CAD), grant an unprecedented control and access, in both magnitude and kind, to the spatial, material, and physical world. Because of this, media illustrate the biopolitical complexity and nuance of the term capture—long used in media praxis—whose meaning can imply both a desire to do justice to a subject, often by means of representational accuracy, and also a desire to do violence to by means of seizing, possessing, or trapping. In turn, this project explores the many affective, epistemological, and aesthetic contours of meaning and impact when transversal media are read through the lens of capture. Organized by five major keywords—making, transversal, play, capture, and preservation—this project illustrates the far-reaching impact of this particular media type that does particular things in this particular moment. Specifically, this project coins the term, transversal media, to discuss this unique media ontology and concretize it through hands-on creative practice and the work of artists, designers, scholars, and activists by centering the methodological richness of hands-on making, creativity, and play. It also addresses the connections between technical affordance and theory, culture, and ethics, as media scholars have modeled with other emerging media formats of the past, like McLuhan on television, Deleuze on film, and Sontag on photography. This approach reveals how various interface affordances and applied practices converse with, and with varying implications, the people, places, and things they mediate. Overall, this project addresses how cultural ideologies are reflected in the design, practice, and rhetoric of 3D transversal media, and how this media genre pushes notions of materiality, embodiment, and power into new realms of thinking, doing, and being.Item No Tangle So Hopeless: Toward a Relational Cluster Analysis(2018) Nichols, Annie Laurie; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How does a semi-nomadic shepherd people on the border of Russia and Azerbaijan place themselves? How do twitter users challenge and transform institutional versions of events? How can citizens resist then narrow confines of reductive algorithmic assumptions on the internet? Questions such as these are not readily answered with traditional rhetorical methods, yet they recommend a rhetorical approach to their focus on meaning-making, constitutive community, and identity creation. This project argues that Kenneth Burke’s method of cluster analysis can be profitably revived to meet rhetoric’s growing need for an approach that focuses on relationships, listens to vernacular voices, engages multiple texts, and considers the world from other viewpoints. The most commonly used approach to cluster analysis is a reductive equational form that is primarily concerned with the dissective, analytic half of cluster analysis. Reconstituting Burke’s more constructive, drawing-together form, this project develops a relational cluster analysis that centers in connections, community, and the relationships between words, people, and ideologies. Relational cluster analysis’ effectiveness is demonstrated by use with ethnographic fieldnotes, a database of 5 million tweets, and the algorithmic infrastructure of Web 2.0. These exemplars demonstrate that, when applied at several layers of meaning, such as individual, community, dominant culture, and cross-cultural, this relational method is particularly generative in working with vernacular voices, community meanings, networked arguments, and digital cultures. Inductively listening to meaning-making foregrounds the subject, leading to substantial insight into not just individual but also community and cultural values and orientations. The elastic nature of a relationally-focused, multilevel cluster analysis affords the opportunity to gaze, engrossed, from others’ points of view.Item Stylin' BlaQueer Feminisms: The Politics of Queer Black Women's Fashion Activism(2018) Blake, Donnesha Alexandra; Bolles, Augusta L; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Stylin’ BlaQueer Feminisms contributes to conversations about the political function of fashion by exploring the ways that queer Black women define activism with fashion and how their practices advance Black feminism. In this study, I aim to define fashion activism, to examine how queer Black women engage in fashion activism in digital and physical spaces, and to outline core themes in their fashion activism. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences prove that fashion is political by using fashion, style, and dress as vehicles to study subject formation, nonverbal communication, and activism. While there are studies about the political nature of fashion that center Black women of various gender and sexual identities, few examine how contemporary Black lesbian and queer women leverage fashion in digital media and cultural institutions to engage in resistance and knowledge production; much less have those studies connected their fashion activism to core themes in Black feminism. I employ mix methods to investigate the practices and performances in six fashion activist projects produced by queer Black women. These methods include visual and discourse analyses of the style blogs; She’s A Gent, A Dapper Chick, and She Does Him Fashion, and season one of the YouTube web series The Androgynous Model; event analyses of two public LGBTQ+ fashion shows Rainbow Fashion Week (RFW) and dapperQ Presents: iD; and interviews with the creators of RFW and The Androgynous Model. In performing a comparative analysis of these projects, I found that intention aside, the practices and performances in these projects signal Black feminist politics such as the centering of marginal identities, self-definition, using the body to signal and subvert controlling images, and coalition building between freedom-making struggles. I call this praxis, BlaQueer Style. Through their articulations of BlaQueer Style, Black lesbian and queer women illustrate that fashion activism is not only the work they do to subvert rigid gender and sexual codes in the existing fashion industry, but it is the labor marginalized communities undertake to leverage fashion, style, or dress to affirm their intersecting identities, build community, and resist oppressive structures in society.Item "How can you love a work, if you don't know it?": Critical code and design towards participatory digital editions(2015) Visconti, Amanda; Kirschenbaum, Matthew; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholarly editors are integral to the continuum that keeps the stories of the past available to and understood by the present--but that public of readers beyond the academy whose interest keeps the humanities alive and relevant is just as important. What if we build a digital edition and invite everyone? What if millions of scholars, first-time readers, book clubs, teachers and their students show up and annotate a text with their "infinite" interpretations, questions, and contextualizations? My dissertation pursues this speculative experiment through the creation of the Infinite Ulysses digital edition; I've studied how to improve the design and functionality of a key artifact of the digital humanities--the digital edition--through this unlikely hypothetical. First, I designed, coded, and publicly released an actual digital edition of James Joyce's Ulysses with various experimental interface features. Second, I conducted user testing and analyzed site analytic data with real readers and researchers. Third, I used the results of the experiment to build on knowledge from fields with a stake in digital social reading: literary studies, textual scholarship, information science, and visual design rhetoric. I'm using this speculative experiment to dream big about the public humanities, produce something practically useful, and capture data to support critical responses to the challenges of a more public digital humanities. Three research areas were explored through these methodologies: 1. How can we design digital editions that are not just public, but invite and assist participation in the scholarly love for the nuances of a text's materiality, history, and meaning? Are there ways to design for meaningful participation that don't necessarily scaffold critical participation? 2. How can we design participatory digital editions to handle an influx of readers and annotations? What might we learn about digital editions and their texts from the accompanying influx of site use data? 3. Can we separate the values of textual scholarship from the physical manifestations of these values? How might this clarification help us imagine new types of digital edition that hold true to those values? A whitepaper serves as a report on the dissertation's process and products.