Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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
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Item Battle of the Brains: Election-Night Forecasting at the Dawn of the Computer Age(2010) Chinoy, Ira; Beasley, Maurine; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines journalists' early encounters with computers as tools for news reporting, focusing on election-night forecasting in 1952. Although election night 1952 is frequently mentioned in histories of computing and journalism as a quirky but seminal episode, it has received little scholarly attention. This dissertation asks how and why election night and the nascent field of television news became points of entry for computers in news reporting. The dissertation argues that although computers were employed as pathbreaking "electronic brains" on election night 1952, they were used in ways consistent with a long tradition of election-night reporting. As central events in American culture, election nights had long served to showcase both news reporting and new technology, whether with 19th-century devices for displaying returns to waiting crowds or with 20th-century experiments in delivering news by radio. In 1952, key players - television news broadcasters, computer manufacturers, and critics - showed varied reactions to employing computers for election coverage. But this computer use in 1952 did not represent wholesale change. While live use of the new technology was a risk taken by broadcasters and computer makers in a quest for attention, the underlying methodology of forecasting from early returns did not represent a sharp break with pre-computer approaches. And while computers were touted in advance as key features of election-night broadcasts, the "electronic brains" did not replace "human brains" as primary sources of analysis on election night in 1952. This case study chronicles the circumstances under which a new technology was employed by a relatively new form of the news media. On election night 1952, the computer was deployed not so much to revolutionize news reporting as to capture public attention. It functioned in line with existing values and practices of election-night journalism. In this important instance, therefore, the new technology's technical features were less a driving force for adoption than its usefulness as a wonder and as a symbol to enhance the prestige of its adopters. This suggests that a new technology's capacity to provide both technical and symbolic social utility can be key to its chances for adoption by the news media.Item Sylvia Porter: Gender, Ambition, and Personal Finance Journalism, 1935-1975(2007-10-15) Lucht, Tracy L; Beasley, Maurine H.; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This historical dissertation examines the career of Sylvia Porter (1913-1991), a syndicated newspaper columnist who developed the genre of personal finance journalism and created a space for women on the financial pages of newspapers. At the height of Porter's success in 1975, she reached forty million readers in more than 350 newspapers, published a monthly financial advice column in Ladies' Home Journal, and had produced a shelf full of books, including the best-selling Sylvia Porter's Money Book. This dissertation--the first full-length account of Porter's career--uses primary sources to trace Porter's evolution from a media curiosity to a nationally recognized expert amid changes in women's social and economic status. The author argues that Porter carved a niche for herself within the male-dominated field of financial journalism by using seven professional strategies: (1) She accepted a job in a non-prestigious field of journalism, (2) she allied herself with her readers rather than her peers, (3) she formed alliances with men who could help her career, (4) she used preconceptions about gender to her advantage, (5) she mythologized herself in interviews with other journalists, (6) she used multiple media platforms to reach different audiences, and (7) she appropriated the labor of other writers. The author also argues that although gender was an important facet of Porter's public persona, her development of personal finance journalism was driven more by market forces and her eventual use of ghostwriters than by prevailing gender norms. Nevertheless, the author argues, Porter opened a door for women in the field and left a complicated legacy.Item First Ladies as Political Women: Press Framing of Presidential Wives, 1900-2001(2004-11-15) Burns, Lisa M.; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project contends that press framing of the U.S. first lady institution throughout the twentieth century positioned presidential wives as important public women who were presented as models of American womanhood. An analysis of the print news coverage reveals that the first lady institution serves as a site of ideological contestation over women's public and political roles, reflecting the intersection of gender, publicity, and power at particular historical moments. The press practice of gendered framing draws on often competing ideologies of American womanhood, and in doing so shapes the content of news narratives. The subjects of the stories often become representatives of social gender norms. I call this practice personification framing, which is the positioning of a well-known individual as the embodiment of a particular ideology. A personification frame serves as an ideological short cut used by journalists to simplify, in the case of first ladies, the complexities of gender role performance, making such discussions easier to insert into the limited space of a single news story. An outgrowth of personification framing is the emergence of first ladies as public women, gendered celebrities, political activists, and political interlopers, positioning that reflects press representations of women's public and political roles at various points in U.S. history. The publicity and scrutiny surrounding gendered performances of the first lady position construct boundaries of empowerment and containment that help to normalize women's public activity and domestic empowerment while challenging women's public and private political influence. Press frames, thus, serve as important boundary markers that help to define "proper" performances of both gender and the first lady position. While first ladies' status as public women and gendered celebrities results in both access to and influence within U.S. political culture, they remain on the fringes, with their power largely limited to domestic matters and women's issues. When their influence is suspected of trespassing too far into the male political reserve, press coverage exhibits a rhetoric of containment that suggests the political activities of first ladies violate the gendered boundaries of institutional performance. Such framing accentuates the contestation that surrounds first ladies as political women.