Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2014, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Critics of Tennyson view his melancholy poetics as a self-evident manifestation. However, not until recently have scholars examined melancholy as a rhetorical structure in Tennyson's poetry. To address this particular gap in scholarly research, this thesis examines the use of black, similar images, and descriptive language in Tennyson"s "Mariana and the Moated Grange," "Mariana in the South," and "The Lady of Shalott." From a close reading of the text and a comparative analysis of Tennyson's poetry, common connections between the four poems become clear. These connections emerge through the contextual evidence for melancholy existing in the imagery, diction, and syntax of Tennyson's writings. Tennyson's use of colors and images creates not only an atmosphere reflective of melancholia, but also manifests the melancholy effect of the restrictive Victorian gaze on the freer imaginary elements of the Romantics. This research provides a framework for identifying the traits of Tennyson's melancholic rhetoric found throughout his poetry. Therefore, this framework offers a starting point for further study of the rhetorical and stylistic development of melancholy in Tennyson's poetry. Additionally, by juxtaposing the obvious melancholic themes in the two Mariana poems with "The Lady of Shalott," one can interpret this poem as more than a representation of the isolated poet. Thus "The Lady of Shalott" when examined in tandem with The "Mariana" poems, affords the necessary link between the imagination and melancholy. Hence, a close examination of "The Lady of Shalott" illuminates the melancholy which overshadows the unbridled imagination.

Committee: Rachel Carnell PhD (Committee Chair); Gary Dyer PhD (Committee Member); Jennifer Jeffers PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, EDU Teaching and Learning

Career-technical education (CTE) is essential in training and educating young people in the United States and has purposefully served a distinct role from comprehensive schooling models. However, the conceptualizations of career-technical education in common perception and in academic research typically reinforce the academic-vocational divide, a pervasive binary that has been maintained throughout history and into today. There is limited empirical research that explores literacies in CTE without the confines of the academic-vocational divide or outside of deficit perspectives of the students in CTE. In this study, I seek to speak to these gaps and dispel the academic-vocational binary by (re)conceptualizing literacies in a career-technical program, pharmacy technician, and an academic course, English language arts. During the 2020-2021 school year, I conducted a multiple-case study with an ethnographic perspective at Northside Area Career Center, a career-technical high school on the outskirts of a major Midwestern city. With a frame of social and sociomaterial perspective of literacies, I drew on theory of figured worlds, including positioning, personhood, and social imagination in order to understand literacy events and practices as they were used and positioned within the pharmacy technician program and ELA class. I primarily constructed data as a participant-observer in these spaces as I collaborated with veteran teachers: the pharmacy technician teacher, Ms. Lark, and the ELA teacher, Ms. Sims. Data collected included fieldnotes, audio and video recorded classroom lessons and lab work, artifacts, and interviews with both teachers and students. I share findings from each case and a comparison across them, arguing that students in both classrooms were learning to be citizens in a democratic society through the teachers centering collaboration, valuing multiple perspectives, and enacting a range of figured worlds. In the ELA class, Ms. Sims established seminars (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Caroline T. Clark (Committee Chair); George Newell (Committee Member); Michiko Hikida (Committee Member); Edward Fletcher (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Educational Theory; Language Arts; Literacy; Pedagogy; Secondary Education; Teaching; Vocational Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, EDU Teaching and Learning

Although studies in higher education have paid attention to the complexities of learning disciplinary language and discourse, little attention has been given to learning professional discourse in a second language (L2). Recent studies on language socialization have addressed this gap by focusing on L2 students' emerging communicative competence in disciplines. However, these studies have primarily paid attention to language and considered the role of embodied actions and objects peripheral in employing the field-specific practices. This dissertation aims to complement this prior research on disciplinary socialization and professional vision by incorporating those two lines of inquiry. This study addresses the following questions: (1) How does an instructor use imagination to engage novice students in disciplinary discourse? And (2) how do L2 students change how they use disciplinary discourse practices and spatial repertoires to construct their telling over time? Taking a language socialization approach, this semester-long video-enabled ethnographic study focuses on desk critiques, or repetitive one-on-one instructional conversations about student design, in a college architectural design studio as a locus of one's learning and socialization. I recruited two instructors and two L2 international students as the focal participants for this study and video recorded all desk crit interactions between a focal instructor and student. To address the first research question, I mapped a desk crit using an advice-giving activity frame to understand how a desk crit is organized and how both parties mutually oriented each other within a crit. Within the schematized desk crit interaction with seven steps, I identified two steps, identifying a student's design problems and offering advice to address the issues, when an instructor (Mr. J) embedded an imagined scenario in telling their design narrative to co-construct perception with their students. Then, using multimodal intera (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Leslie Moore (Advisor); Melinda Rhoades (Committee Member); Caroline Clark (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture; Education; English As A Second Language; Higher Education; Language; Sociolinguistics; Teacher Education

Doctor of Ministry , Ashland University, 2020, Doctor of Ministry Program

The purpose of this project was to create a resource for Christian Caregivers that would educate them concerning formative practices for children. A group of sixteen experts in the three fields of ministry, psychology, and education were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the resource through the completion of a survey. The response indicated that the resource was successful in educating Christian Caregivers concerning formative practices for children. The qualitative section of the survey also revealed that most respondents, though unfamiliar with the practices, were eager to implement them in their lives and the lives of those in their care.

Committee: Dawn Morton Dr (Committee Chair); Thomas Gilmore Dr (Advisor) Subjects: Pastoral Counseling; Religious Education; Spirituality

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2020, English

Bodies of Knowledge promotes the investigation of dance literature, or texts that emphasize dance choreography, cultural origins of dance forms, and the development of a kinesthetic sense of self. In particular, I look at how Latina writers embrace dance as a way of negotiating and expanding experiences of cultural difference. To do so I use the term "embodied knowledge" - developed from dance studies scholars like Didre Sklar and Susan Leigh Foster (among others) - to identify the way bodily practices inform social identities. I expand upon this term by arguing that it is part of a process of becoming wherein a dancer's somatic awareness also informs her gender, sexuality, and cultural belonging. I align this term with Latina writers like Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, who argue that the racialized body is a site of transformation through the imagination. Through the literary representations of dancing Latina bodies, I contend language is a vital component of the embodied knowledge of dance because it activates what Joseph Roach calls the kinesthetic imagination. I argue the narratives in this dissertation initiate embodied knowledge through the kinesthetic imagination which results in complex representations of Latinas. I focus on dance literature written in the transition between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. During this period, Latina authors presented narratives where protagonists began to make choices independent of either Latin American or United States cultures. The first-person narratives in this dissertation emphasize the crucial role the body plays in both learning how to dance and learning how to navigate cultural contexts as Latinas, in all various iterations, because of this attention to embodiment. The texts - Esmeralda Santiago's memoirs, When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), Almost a Woman (1998), and The Turkish Lover (2004), Alma Guillermoprieto's memoir, Dancing with Cuba (2004), Ana Castillo's novel Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999 (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Andrew Hebard (Advisor); Katie Johnson (Committee Member); Tim Melley (Committee Member); Elena Albarrán (Committee Member) Subjects: Dance; Literature; Performing Arts

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2020, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

In 2008 Kosovo gained independence and began to transition into statehood. During that transition a new constitution was created providing an opportunity for new leadership roles for Kosovar women. In 2017, Kosovar Ambassador Teuta Sahatqija gave a speech at Ohio Northern University's College of Law titled “The Leadership Roles of Women in Transitional States.” It was at this speech that she shared many stories and photos illustrating the ways in which Kosovar women were breaking silences during this transition period. This dissertation applies the lens of the rhetoric of silence and feminist rhetoric to the rhetorical moves made by women in Kosovo that Ambassador Sahatqija described in her speech. Four discussion points of the Ambassador's speech (artifacts) were chosen for analysis. The artifacts chosen were a story she told about the parliament women protesting a diplomatic assignment list that was only comprised of men, Articles 7, 22, and 37 of the new Kosovo Constitution, and a memorial and an art installation both dedicated to the estimated 20,000 rape victims of the Kosovo war. Heuristic analysis of these artifacts explored the ways in which these artifacts helped women overcome silences previously placed upon them, prevent future silencing, and amplified Kosovar women's voices. The analysis found that each artifact gave women in Kosovo agency and empowered them to make global changes and amplify the voices of women. It found that each of the artifacts utilized social circulation, globalization, critical imagination, and strategic contemplation in ways that allowed them to de-silence women. This dissertation concludes that the implications of these rhetorical moves to overcome silences and amplify marginalized voices can have impact on a larger more global scale. It also suggests ways that we can incorporate the same movements in our classrooms in order to continue to amplify previously silenced voices and help our students find their own voice.

Committee: Sue Carter Wood PhD (Advisor); Danielle Kuhl PhD (Other); Neil Baird PhD (Committee Member); Lee Nickoson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2020, Psychology

The phenomenological characteristics of memory are similar to those of imagination: Remembering the past and imagining the future share many subjective qualities. In part, this similarity may be attributable to the finding that the ability to construct a coherent scene underlies both remembered and imagined events (Hassabis & Maguire, 2007). However, prior studies have assumed that past events are remembered events, and future events are imagined events, whereas previous research from our lab has shown that people report future events being felt as remembered (Branch & Anderson, 2018). The proposed dissertation seeks to further define these feelings of remembering. What makes an event feel remembered, even if it has yet, and possibly might not, occur? In order to answer this question, participants in Study 1 recalled memories, imagined modifications to the central or peripheral objects contained within the representation of the memory for the event, and then imagined that modified event occurring either in the future or counterfactual past. Participants rated the degree to which the modified event “feels as though I am remembering.” Our manipulation was successful in that participants reported modified events, regardless of temporal orientation, as being less remembered and more imagined than baseline events, providing evidence that there is a phenomenological distinction between remembering and imagining separate from past and future events. Participants in Study 2 recalled a past event, a counterfactual event, and a future event, and rated each event for the degree to which it contained a spatial layout, vivid objects and people of central and peripheral importance, and the degree to which the participant could decouple from the present and mentally travel through time to when the event had or would occur. Ratings of object and scene construction individually formed an index that, together with autonoesis, were used to predict the degree to which an event felt li (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Anderson Ph.D. (Advisor); Dale Klopfer Ph.D. (Committee Member); William O'Brien Ph.D. (Committee Member); Katherine Brodeur Ph.D. (Other) Subjects: Psychology

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2019, Political Science (Arts and Sciences)

Imagination is used in the colloquial, everyday lives of people, where the concept functions as a detachment between the metaphysical and the physical. Imagination as a concept is therefore powerful, whereas Political Science and other fields use imagination more in the colloquial sense. This work seeks to illuminate the potential conceptual power of imagination in Political Science by analyzing the structure of imagination and its purpose, referring to imagination's temporal characteristic, its roots in experience, and as a pathway to the many futures and the process of becoming that challenge normative reiterations. This claim changes Political Science by emphasizing the performative intention of invoking imaginative power in revolutionizing and rendering future possibilities that extend beyond the realm of normative functional power.

Committee: Kirstine Taylor (Committee Chair); Vincent Jungkunz (Committee Member); Nukhet Sandal (Committee Member) Subjects: Black Studies; Caribbean Studies; Gender Studies; Hispanic American Studies; International Relations; Latin American Studies; Political Science

MFA, Kent State University, 2018, College of Communication and Information / School of Visual Communication Design

This thesis explores the relationship between children and our modern consumer culture. Despite well-intended efforts in culture to encourage play and toys that aid the growth and maturation of children, our culture's overpowering business vector treats childhood as one more consumer group – and one easily influenced. The present research has proved the growing reliance on screen-based devices for children's play as well as the alarming addiction children seem to develop to a screen-based imaginative life. The primary goal of this thesis is to develop a simple, tactile, inexpensive toy that would engage children (3-6 years) in a more open-ended way than the programmatic “imaginations” of software productions. Something the child could program. Break apart, remake, invent. Therefore the aim is not to provide imagination to a child but instead to provide an opportunity for the child to imagine. The first chapter focuses on the research and discusses child development, the evolution of childhood culture, and the consumer-age childhood. Specifically, then, the project centers in on understanding the process of development and the role play has in that process as well as the impact of consumer culture on modern childhood. In the second phase, various materials and their qualities as related to children toys are analyzed. Also, a survey was used to gather field data. Both quantitative and qualitative outcomes of the research questionnaire are presented and evaluated. The survey results are used to obtain a deeper understanding of children's needs and explore possibilities for the product (cardboard toy). Additionally, in this phase, some observations are made from a study conducted during children's art classes, in which the children's interactions with each other and their interaction with various media supplies were closely monitored. And lastly, Donald Norman's theory of emotional design is examined along with further deep investigation about how it applies t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jessica Barness (Advisor); Aoife Mooney (Committee Member); David Middleton (Committee Member); Nate Mucha (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Design; Early Childhood Education; Technology

PHD, Kent State University, 2018, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Foundations, Leadership and Administration

Dozens of academic studies over the course of the past four or five decades have shown empirically that Catholic schools, according to a wide array of standards and measures, are the best schools at producing good American citizens. This dissertation proposes that this is so is partly because the schools are infused with the Catholic ethos (also called the Catholic Imagination or the Analogical Imagination) and its approach to the world in general. A large part of this ethos is based upon Catholic Anthropology, the Church's teaching about the nature of the human person and his or her relationship to other people, to Society, to the State, and to God. The ideas that make up Catholic Anthropology are also deeply foundational to the set of ideas known collectively as Western Civilization and, through them, to the ideas that together I call the American Covenant. This study takes a foundational approach. While the empirical studies have measured the effects of Catholic schools in making good American citizens, I explore the reasons for this outcome. In doing so, I draw from many disciplines to examine the historical events, significant persons, and philosophical and theological arguments that together have created the American Catholic school. I conclude that if present trends in Catholic schooling continue, there is potentially a great loss to both American Catholicism and to the American republic.

Committee: Natasha Levinson (Advisor); Averil McClelland (Committee Member); Catherine Hackney (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Education History; Education Philosophy; Education Policy; Educational Theory

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, History

This dissertation charts the path by which an idealized understanding of the Soviet Union aided the transformation of Marxism from a counter-hegemonic to a hegemonic discourse within China over the course of the four decades from the 1917 October Revolution until Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 “Secret Speech.” It probes previously unexamined commercial, political, and student presses, as well as organizational records, to detail ways by which the “image” of the Soviet Union was employed by separate groups to critique domestic political forces during China's Republican era (1912-49), challenge capitalism and international imperialism, and secure popular support during the early years of the People's Republic (1949-). Such inquiry sheds light on the conflicting ways in which Chinese imagined themselves and their world, and reveals an alternative conception of modernity that promised to bridge “East” and “West.” Chapters One, Two, and Four through Six provide a chronological reading of the “Soviet Union” in Shanghai and Beijing presses. As China experienced the consecutive pangs of revolutionary upheaval, state consolidation, foreign invasion, and civil war, the “meaning” of the Soviet Union also changed. Activists in the 1920s viewed the October Revolution as the opening salvo of a growing international movement against all forms of oppression. Over the following decades, however, “modernization” eclipsed “internationalism” as the USSR's chief selling point. The Soviet Union came to be portrayed as an industrialized nation with high rates of economic growth, able to provide for its citizens, and withstand foreign aggression. By depicting New China as the “younger brother” of the modern USSR, the Chinese Communist Party upon taking power implied that it would be able to replicate Soviet successes domestically. Chapters Three, Seven, and Eight examine organizations that defined their respective eras: the proletarian women's movement of the 1920s, and Shangh (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christopher Reed (Advisor); Ying Zhang (Committee Member); David Hoffmann (Committee Member); Judy Wu (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Studies; History; Mass Media; Modern History; Political Science; Russian History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1983, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1965, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2016, Theology

This dissertation argues that Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr.'s Roman Catholicism is undervalued when understanding his role crafting late 1950s and 1960s public policies. Shriver played a role in desegregating Chicago's Catholic and public school systems as well as Catholic hospitals. He helped to shape and lead the Peace Corps. He also designed many of the programs launched in President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Shriver's ability to produce new policies and agencies within a broader structure of governance is well known. However, Shriver's Catholicism is often neglected when examining his influence on key public policy initiatives and innovations. This dissertation argues that Shriver's Roman Catholic upbringing formed him in such a way as to understand the nature of large bureaucracies and to see possibilities for innovation within an overarching structure. Shriver encountered both Catholic religious orders and lay sodalities at a young age and developed a posture of institutional imagination. This aspect of his Roman Catholic faith helped him to pursue social innovation within the framework of government power rather than from the edges of US society. Therefore, Shriver's Catholicism left him uniquely suited for generating new institutions within a broader context of the US government. Shriver's penchant for innovation echoes the formation of various religious orders and lay sodalities within Roman Catholicism that found room within a much broader Roman Catholic Church for addressing emergent problems.

Committee: Anthony Smith Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Sandra Yocum Ph.D. (Committee Member); Cecilia Moore Ph.D. (Committee Member); David O'Brien Ph.D. (Committee Member); William Portier Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: History; International Relations; Political Science; Religion; Religious History; Theology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Philosophy

We exercise the propositional imagination whenever we imagine that p – e.g. that it's snowing outside, that Othello murders Desdemona, or that cats are actually Martian-controlled robots. Here I aim to sketch a pluralistic account of propositional imagination, according to which the cognitive phenomena associated with imagination are underpinned by multiple kinds of psychological state. I begin by presenting the default cognitive account of propositional imagination. What I call the new cognitive theory has played a central role in displacing early attempts in developmental psychology to link pretend play in toddlers to an early capacity to reason about the unobservable psychological states of oneself and others. Roughly put, the new cognitive theory casts imagination as a distinct cognitive attitude, yet one that is compositionally akin to belief. I argue, however, that there's a deep explanatory tension in this account's core commitments. In particular, the view faces the asymmetry challenge; for, the vehicles of imagination are cast as so very similar to those of belief that there seems to be little reason to suppose that they should play the robustly distinct functional role that the theory demands. Next, I evaluate an emerging alternative approach – the single attitude account – which assimilates the mechanisms and vehicles of propositional imagination to those of counterfactual reasoning generally. I argue that the alternative approach fails to accommodate important tracts of data surrounding our consumption and production of fictions. In the penultimate chapter, I consider how these two accounts of imagination propose to understand the architecture of pretense. One important, unresolved issue here surrounds the question of whether children require recourse to metacognition – i.e. beliefs about imagination, and perhaps other mental states – in order to recognize and engage in pretense. I argue that – in spite of the suggestions by the proponents of both new co (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Samuels (Advisor); Declan Smithies (Committee Member); Timothy Schroeder (Committee Member) Subjects: Philosophy

MA, Kent State University, 2014, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Philosophy

The objective of this thesis is to give a phenomenological account of the relationship between imagination and aesthetic experience. To begin, I give a preliminary sketch of some monumental figures in the area of aesthetics that have influenced phenomenological reflection on art. I then use the philosophy of Mikel Dufrenne to provide the basis of a phenomenological aesthetics, emphasizing the distinction between the work of art and the aesthetic object as well as providing an account of the structure of aesthetic experience. I then turn to Edward Casey's analysis of imagination to argue that the relationship between aesthetic experience and imagination is mutually beneficial. Finally, I apply this line of reasoning to the art of photography to give an example of the reciprocal relationship between imagination and aesthetic experience.

Committee: Gina Zavota Ph.D. (Advisor); Frank Ryan Ph.D. (Committee Member); Linda Williams Ph.D. (Committee Member); Navjotika Kumar Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, English

My dissertation examines the doll as a nexus between materialism and imagination in the literature and popular culture of the Victorian period. The emergence of the doll as we conceive of it today is a Victorian phenomenon. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that a dedicated doll industry was developed and that dolls began to find their way into children's literature, the rhetoric of femininity, periodical publications and canonical texts. Surprisingly, the Victorian fascination with the doll has largely gone unexamined, and critics and readers have tended to dismiss dolls as mere agents of female acculturation and symbols of passivity. Guided by the recent material turn in Victorian studies and drawing extensively from texts only recently made available through digitization projects and periodical databases, my research seeks to provide a richer account of the way this most fraught and symbolic of objects figured in the lives and imaginations of the Victorians. Given this treatment, the doll emerges as an object celebrated for its remarkable imaginative potential. The doll, I argue, is therefore best understood as a descendant of Galatea – as a woman turned object, but also as an object that Victorians constantly and variously brought to life through the imagination. The chapters of my dissertation examine how this imaginative potential was put to use but also how it was perceived as coming under threat by the pressures of materialism and commercialization. In my first chapter I examine how the “doll memoir,” a once popular subgenre within children's literature in which dolls are endowed with subjectivity as the narrators of their own stories, co-opted the imagination to generate a sense of disciplinary surveillance in its young readers, threatening to reverse the power relationship between girls and their dolls. In chapter two, I examine the fanciful animation of dolls in play as a precursor to the animation of characters in literary production (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David G. Riede (Advisor); Jill Galvan (Committee Member); Clare A. Simmons (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2011, African-American and African Studies

"Towards a New Black Nation: Space, Place, Citizenship and Imagination" is a project dedicated to examining the ways in which race, geography, and politics intersect to create a sovereign space in visual art and popular media for African Americans to imagine full citizenship. By examining black politics and black nation building through these various lenses, I argue that African Americans use popular media and visual art as channels to acquire access to citizenship rights. With the disappearance of a visible black political movement, black Americans have innovatively used these channels to create an alternative space to deploy Black Nationalism and construct a black nation. I call this space the New Black Nation. Particularly, this project focuses on the viability of the Imagined South, a U.S. South that is dehistoricized, southernized, and recreated as a perfect melding of rural and urban culture, as a home for the New Black Nation. "Towards a New Black Nation: Space, Place, Citizenship and Imagination" interrogates black gender politics and the performance of black male sexuality in this New Black Nation located in the Imagined South. In order to engage this New Black Nation, "Towards a New Black Nation: Space, Place,Citizenship and Imagination" weaves together a discursive reading of Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married, the work of Tom Joyner of the nationally syndicated program, the Tom Joyner Morning Show, and various representations of black nonheteronormative bodies that exist (though not wholly) within the black nation.

Committee: Simone Drake PhD (Advisor); Rebecca Wanzo PhD (Committee Member); James Upton PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; Black Studies

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2009, Computer Science and Engineering

Graphs of various kinds are important in modern culture. Humans can understand and draw inferences from large amounts of data represented in a graphical format more easily than the same data represented in textual form. Even though graphs seem to be very effective, a badly designed graph may affect the accuracy or speed in comprehending information represented in a graph. Graph designers, instead of just depending on just their intuitions about what makes a good graph, need guidance based on a set of scientific principles. The relevant science involves understanding the various cognitive processes involved in graph comprehension. This has led many scientists to study graph comprehension as a cognitive task. However, most of the models proposed by the various scientists are qualitative descriptions of aspects of the graph comprehension process. Though these models are consistent with a computational approach, they were neither expressed as computer programs, nor were they sufficiently detailed to support implementation as a computer program. Computational models are more useful than descriptive models, since they can be run on a computer to predict behavioral details such as time taken to perform tasks under varying assumptions. Our goal in this work is to build a computational cognitive model for graph comprehension that unifies the multiplicity of models proposed by the various researchers in our survey. Instead of multiple models, we will have one model that exhibits the multiplicity of identified phenomena under appropriate conditions. We should be able to explain how background knowledge, the attention mechanism, visual activities such as scanning and anchoring, and mental imagery – all features of a general architecture – are deployed opportunistically in the specific graph comprehension task in response to the specifics of the task and agent's situation. The thesis describes a set of models for a range of graph comprehension tasks that together provide the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran (Advisor); John Josephson (Committee Member) Subjects: Artificial Intelligence

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2009, Art

Films, movies, even overly exorbitant, big budget Hollywood films can hold a place in the mind of an artist that is as significant as some of the other sources that artists often use to fuel their work. Movies are sometimes questioned in their validity or place in the studio of an artist, and I believe that for certain reasons, Hollywood films and associated ideas of fame and celebrity can provide a fruitful a place of exploration. Hollywood films, in the minds of certain individuals, myself included, provide a place for the imagination to wander, to escape from daily activities and revel in the nostalgia of childhood or memory: a place to explore the desire associated with dreams, the fame that often comes with being a celebrity, and the endurance behind the idea of work ethic that can fuel such explorations.

Committee: Laura Lisbon (Committee Chair); Amy Youngs (Committee Member); Suzanne Silver (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts