College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Digital Frost: Accessibility and Public Humanities(2020) Yokoyama, Setsuko; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)His frequently recirculated televised reading at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration ceremony attests to the fact that Robert Frost is often remembered as one of the iconic popular poets of the early twentieth century. What is less remembered today is the fact that Frost gave talks and readings at universities, colleges, and other public venues for nearly five decades to make poetry accessible to general readers. These talks epitomize Frost’s dedication to the democratic discussion of literature and daily discourse as he demonstrated, through humor, how to practice auditory attentiveness to the figures of speech used by poets, scientists, politicians, and other authority figures. Though central to his career and his contribution to American culture and literary history, Frost’s public performance as a genre has long been overlooked primarily due to the inaccessibility of audio recordings housed in archives. Digital Frost: Accessibility and Public Humanities investigates how best to redress such critical neglect of Frost’s public talks and readings through the development of a pilot audio edition and the discussion of theoretical underpinnings of the very edition’s design. As part of the larger effort to build a cross-intuitional platform in partnership with literary scholars, special collections librarians, Frost’s family members and friends, as well as the poet’s literary estate and publisher, the pilot audio edition tests the feasibility of critical collaboration and expands on the disciplinary responsibility of textual scholarship. In its accompanying chapters, Digital Frost contests the seemingly monolithic discourse around “accessibility” via analyses of its sociohistorical meanings from archival, literary, disability, and digital studies perspectives. Digital Frost argues that only when technical accessibility is concomitantly considered from a sociohistorical perspective, are we equipped to invent a culturally appropriate access design for online literary collections.Item Zero-Sum Game: GamerGate and the Networked Discourse of Hate(2019) Meyer, Joseph Bernard; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Zero-Sum Game utilizes GamerGate – a 2014 harassment campaign against prominent women in the video game industry – to develop a close reading of networked publics in order to understand how power manifests and is enacted online. I combine Actor Network Theory and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis to first map and archive GamerGate’s participants, targets, platforms, and media followed by platform-specific feminist readings of discourse occurring across the map. Each chapter focuses on how hate and harassment transform (and are magnified) across platforms, an analysis that is further refracted through multidisciplinary, theoretical frameworks. These frameworks are 1) the gamer technicity that subsumed overt white supremacist heteropatriarchy into developing neoliberal individualism that replaces embodied identity with identity through consumption, 2) the ecology of social media and the interaction of platforms that amplify and transform digital expressive media, 3) a phenomenology of information exploring the mediation of lived experience via networked publics that challenges dominant ideology while also providing the tools for the denial of alternative subjectivities and the construction of alternative information networks, and 4) a consumer choice model of online harassment that builds on the previous three theories to provide consumption of an “apolitical” identity that allows for the abdication of responsibility for the actions of hate groups and harassment they have allied themselves with. I argue that the driving force behind GamerGate is the reactionary impulse by those who benefit from structures of power to the challenges posed by broadcast experiences and identities unfiltered by hegemonic processes of traditional media structures. GamerGate thus signifies the violent reaction by those in power to the loss of control faced in the digital age as discursive constructions of identity are challenged across platforms.Item Talk Amongst Yourselves: Conceptions of “Community” in Transgender Counterpublic Discourse Online, 1990-2014(2017) Dame, Avery; King, Katie; Farman, Jason; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the mid-1990s, digital technologies have played a key role in major political actions and social movement organizations in the US and elsewhere. Newly widespread public internet access mitigated issues related to geographic limitations or cost-prohibitive print media, allowing otherwise-disparate groups to more quickly and easily communicate and organize. Transgender individuals were particularly well-positioned to benefit from the growth in digital technologies, which supported an active and growing transgender social movement throughout the 1990s. Both recent scholarship and popular media have focused on digital technologies as key sites of visibility, social support, and political organizing for transgender individuals. However, few scholars have also focused on the specific technological infrastructures that underlie these discussions. This dissertation remedies this gap through an analysis of digital communications’ impact on transgender social movement organizing from 1990 to the contemporary moment. Using critical and multi-modal discourse analysis, I analyze how users past and present develop their understanding of what “transgender community” should be, and the ways different platform-specific affordances shape these understandings. My approach is grounded in platform studies: focused on the interrelationships between platforms, platform design, and the discourse produced on these platforms, while also paying close attention to the social and cultural factors that influenced a platform’s design. I take a case study approach, with each chapter focused on a different platform or dataset, from 1990s transgender periodicals, archival data from Usenet newsgroups, ethnographic interviews, informational websites, to social media platform Tumblr. Throughout each of these chapters, I draw attention to how platform affordances inform users’ emergent understanding of “transgender community” as a homogenous entity—obscuring key differences, disconnects, and inequalities amongst users and within the identity category itself. Ultimately, I find that the possibilities for online political organizing are constrained by the digital platform’s modes of circulation and its encoded social norms, as power is channeled away from those who need it most.Item DATA SHARING ACROSS RESEARCH AND PUBLIC COMMUNITIES(2016) He, Yurong; Preece, Jennifer; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For several decades, the intensifying trend of researchers to believe that sharing research data is “good” has overshadowed the belief that sharing data is “bad.” However, sharing data is difficult even though an impressive effort has been made to solve data sharing issues within the research community, but relatively little is known about data sharing beyond the research community. This dissertation aims to address this gap by investigating how data are shared effectively across research and public communities. The practices of sharing data with both researchers and non-professionals in two comparative case studies, Encyclopedia of Life and CyberSEES, were examined by triangulating multiple qualitative data sources (i.e., artifacts, documentation, participant observation, and interviews). The two cases represent the creation of biodiversity data, the beginning of the data sharing process in a home repository, and the end of the data sharing process in an aggregator repository. Three research questions are asked in each case: • Who are the data providers? • Who are the data sharing mediators? • What are the data sharing processes? The findings reveal the data sharing contexts and processes across research and public communities. Data sharing contexts are reflected by the cross-level data providers and human mediators rooted in different groups, whereas data sharing processes are reflected by the dynamic and sustainable collaborative efforts made by different levels of human mediators with the support of technology mediators. This dissertation provides theoretical and practical contributions. Its findings refine and develop a new data sharing framework of knowledge infrastructure for different-level data sharing across different communities. Both human and technology infrastructure are made visible in the framework. The findings also provide insight for data sharing practitioners (i.e., data providers, data mediators, data managers, and data contributors) and information system developers and designers to better conduct and support open and sustainable data sharing across research and public communities.Item ACCESSIBILITY IN CONTEXT: UNDERSTANDING THE TRULY MOBILE EXPERIENCE OF USERS WITH MOTOR IMPAIRMENTS(2014) Naftali, Maia; Findlater, Leah; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Touchscreen smartphones are becoming broadly adopted by the US population. Ensuring that these devices are accessible for people with disabilities is critical for equal access. For people with motor impairments, the vast majority of studies on touchscreen mobile accessibility have taken place in the laboratory. These studies show that while touchscreen input offers advantages, such as requiring less strength than physical buttons, it also presents accessibility challenges, such as the difficulty of tapping on small targets or making multitouch gestures. However, because of the focus on controlled lab settings, past work does not provide an understanding of contextual factors that impact smartphone use in everyday life, and the activities these devices enable for people with motor impairments. To investigate these issues, this thesis research includes two studies, first, an in-person study with four participants with motor impairments that included diary entries and an observational session, and, secondarily, an online survey with nine respondents. Using case study analysis for the in-person participants, we found that mobile devices have the potential to help motor-impaired users reduce the physical effort required for everyday tasks (e.g., turning on a TV, checking transit accessibility in advance), that challenges in touchscreen input still exist, and that the impact of situational impairments to this population can be impeding. The online survey results confirm these findings, for example, highlighting the difficulty of text input, particularly when users are out and mobile rather than at home. Based on these findings, future research should focus on the enhancement of current touchscreen input, exploring the potential of wearable devices for mobile accessibility, and designing more applications and services to improve access to physical world.