Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1955, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Language

Master of Environmental Science, Miami University, 2016, Environmental Sciences

Place names are vital to orienting ourselves in the world. In ancient times, people must have had names for places like hunting grounds or berry groves. This act of naming roughly delineates geographic features which can be revisited and described to others, affixing an added cultural meaning to that place. Place naming has since come a long way. Official place names for the United States and its territories are managed by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), National Geospatial Technical Operations Center (NGTOC). This report details my experience working in the Geographic Names Unit. As a Pathways Career Intern, my main duties were to manage the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), a database containing official place names for features outlined on federal topographic maps. Most of the work involved duplicate names; an issue where there are two name records for one feature, often indicating that one record is a copy and should be deleted. Sometimes the two records were not copies, and the correct locations were identified by visually analyzing historic and recent maps. The coordinates were then updated respectively in the GNIS. I gained valuable experience reading topographic maps, identifying features and managing a large database of geographic names.

Committee: Robbyn Abbitt MS (Committee Chair); Suzanne Zazycki JD (Committee Member); Mark Allen Peterson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Cartography; Computer Science; Cultural Anthropology; Earth; Environmental Science; Geographic Information Science; Geography; History; Information Science; Information Technology; Language; Native American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Philosophy

Works of fiction play an expansive role in our cognitive economy. Despite their prominence in both everyday conversation and literary discourse, fictional characters and events pose foundational puzzles to theories of linguistic meaning and communication: Given that fictional entities lack the existence of ordinary targets of reference, how can we explain meaningful tracts of discourse about them? This dissertation is a collection of papers which addresses three core puzzles in the semantics and pragmatics of fiction. First, I address the puzzle posed by the semantics of fictional names. Standard approaches have tended to assume that fictional names are referentially empty singular terms. I argue that fictional names are not best characterized as singular terms, but instead have the basic semantic function of predicates. On the predicativist account I propose, fictional names function similarly to more generic thematic predicates such as protagonist. In motivating this view, I draw on several neglected sources of linguistic evidence. In particular, I draw on evidence from embeddings in complex noun phrases such as the character N to support the view that fictional names are semantically differentiable from nonfictional names. Second, I address the role of linguistic pretense in accounts of the speech acts rendered in the mode of storytelling. I identify two central challenges for pretense-theoretic accounts of the illocutionary force of storytelling. First, such accounts fail to uphold the contrast between fictional representations and factual misrepresentations, insofar as they take storytelling to involve literally expressing felicitous falsehoods under a pretense of truth. Second, such accounts confront a version of the Frege-Geach challenge, insofar as pretense theorists fail to contributions that unembedded fictional sentences make to logically more complex constructions. I propose that these challenges can be avoided by treating fictional truth as a g (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Stewart Shapiro (Advisor); Tristram McPherson (Committee Member); Robert Kraut (Committee Member) Subjects: Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Sociology

Recent advances in gender theories highlight gender as a primary cultural frame in interpersonal relations, enabling the reproduction of gender inequalities in daily interactions despite ongoing social changes toward equality. However, existing research has not fully addressed how the gender frame works in ambiguous and uncertain contexts, which are increasingly common in contemporary life. My dissertation fills in this knowledge gap by offering an innovative case of gender ambiguous signals—Chinese names written in English letters. Due to language barriers, Chinese names are inherently gender ambiguous for U.S. individuals who do not speak this language. How do people perceive the gender of such an ambiguous signal? How do Chinese individuals navigate this name-based gender ambiguity in daily life? Using a mixed-method design, including an online survey experiment, computational text analysis, and qualitative in-depth interviews, this dissertation demonstrates that perceivers draw gender meanings from Chinese names based on cultural and contextual factors, and that the name-based gender ambiguity serves as a source of marginalization for name-carriers. First, based on an online survey experiment with 795 U.S. individuals, I show that respondents predominantly assign a binary gender (vs. neutral or unsure) to Chinese names. Moreover, respondents who endorsed that Chinese people are socially cold or generally competent are more likely to perceive Chinese names as men's names. The findings suggest that the gender frame persists in ambiguous contexts and highlight a gender component embedded in racialized stereotypes. Second, I examine what contents of gender meanings are embedded in Chinese names within the broad cultural environment. Using the GloVe word embeddings algorithm trained on Common Crawl—a standard English corpus of online text including 840 billion words, I extract associations between Chinese names and five dimensions of gender meanings. Results s (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Claudia Buchmann (Committee Chair); David Melamed (Committee Member); Rin Reczek (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), University of Findlay, 2024, Education

High school students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ+) are more likely than their non-LGBTQ+ peers to experience victimization, bullying, and are at a high rate for experiencing suicidal thoughts. The purpose of this study is to better understand positive and affirming experiences related to a person's identity as a member of the LGBTQ+ community while they were in high school. While previous studies have looked at the issue of educator preparedness and best practices from the experience of teachers, this study aims to better understand students' perceptions of teacher inclusive practices. This paper, grounded in a qualitative approach, utilizes queer theory and the concept of heteronormativity to investigate young adults' perspectives as they reflect on their high school experience as a person in the LGBTQ+ community. Interviews with seven young adults helped to investigate the positive experiences these young adults had in high school and how their school, and specific educators, helped to facilitate these impactful experiences. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and organized under themes related to inclusive practices, educator traits, best practices, and school climate. Findings point to a need for a multidimensional and woven approach to inclusion that involves formal allyship, visually and verbally inclusive practices, and special attention paid to the burying of dead names for transgender and nonbinary youth. Further implications and topics for future research are discussed.

Committee: Diana Garlough (Committee Chair); Robin Walters-Powell (Committee Member); Amanda Ochsner (Committee Member) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Education , University of Dayton, 2024, Educational Administration

Past and current research has explored the link between the “blackness” of a person's name and socioeconomic outcomes in American society. Black-sounding names were shown to influence employment prospects, access to credit markets, and choice of housing among other opportunities. While education research had identified a relationship between teachers' perceptions of students with distinctively Black names and perceived academic potential, it had yet to examine how targeted students perceive and internalize nameism, a portmanteau of name and racism, in predominantly white learning environments. A qualitative study examined nameism and its influence on students' selfconceptions and learning experiences. Using a phenomenological gaze to study participants' experiences, the results revealed mixed, contradictory views on Blacksounding names within the sample. Study participants expressed feeling compelled to maintain varying situational identities to avoid name-identity threats expressed through implicit bias and microaggressions. Participatory action research was used to construct a multimodal, evidence-based intervention to address nameism as a problem of practice in classrooms where experiences with nameism are most likely to occur.

Committee: Aaliyah Baker (Committee Chair); Kiara Lee (Committee Member); Rochonda Nenonene (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; Black History

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1965, English

Committee: Wayne S. Huffman (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

PHD, Kent State University, 2022, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Computer Science

Identifier names are an intrinsic part of the software and more importantly, program comprehension. They are the primary source of information programmers use to acquire knowledge about source code. There are many ways to improve the comprehension of software, but one crucial way is to improve the quality of names used inside the source code. High-quality identifiers play an essential role in increasing productivity, and according to the literature, high-quality identifier names save a significant amount of time and costs during software evolution. The dissertation comprehensively examines factors for assessing the quality of method names in source code. Ten method naming standards are proposed and evaluated by +1100 software engineering professionals. The various standards for source code method names are derived from and supported in the software engineering literature. The large-scale evaluation results in a consensus among developers that the standards are accepted and used in practice. Factors such as years of experience and programming language knowledge are also considered. The dissertation also presents an approach and a tool to automatically assess the quality of method names by providing a quality rate and feedback about the flaw in a name. The approach implements the ten method naming standards to evaluate a given method name. Natural language processing techniques such as part-of-speech tagging, identifier splitting, and dictionary lookup are used to implement the standards. A large golden set of method name quality ratings is developed. Each method name is rated by several experienced developers and labeled as conforming to each standard or not. These ratings allow comparing the results of the proposed approach against expert assessment. The golden set is used to evaluate the approach. The approach is also applied to several systems written in different programming languages, and the results are manually inspected for accuracy. The final resul (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jonathan Maletic (Advisor); Mikhail Nesterenko (Committee Member); L. Gwenn Volkert (Committee Member); Michael Carl (Other); Joseph Ortiz (Committee Member); Michael Collard (Committee Member); Gokarna Sharma (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2019, Mathematics/Mathematics (Pure)

The purpose of this study was to assess whether or not changing the name of an assessment impacted student's performances and perceptions. The major goal of the study was to address whether or not further research into this question was warranted. Some background research that tons of research has been done on names and perceptions as well as Test Anxiety but none had made any connections between them. In order to accomplish this three teachers, who were teaching two sections of Introductions to Probability and Statistics, were asked to keep one class the same and change the name of their quizzes to checkins in the other. Each teacher was told to handle their quiz class like they normally would so as to give use a basis to compare our information too. Then in their checkin class they were asked to refer to them as checkins throughout the semester. They were told that if students caught on to reassure the students that they were not. Then on the final assessment students were given a pre assessment survey before taking their assessment, and a post assessment survey after their assessment. These where designed using questions to help determine students Test Anxiety. Once the semester had ended the teachers sent all their assessment data to me. To help collect more information all three teachers were interviewed plus a fourth teacher who had success changing the name in her class from the year before. From the surveys and interviews with the teachers we concluded that students' perception of the assessment was altered. They believed that checkins would be different than quizzes; however, the effect did not last long. From the interviews we learned some suggestions that would help prolong the effect. For example: changing how they are handled, how much they are worth, and the frequency of them. We also learned that the time a class was held had a bigger impact on students then Test Anxiety. Thus, we concluded that changing the name would indeed impact students perce (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Meel Ed.D. (Advisor); Kimberly Rogers Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Mathematics; Mathematics Education

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2018, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: School Psychology

The current study examined the effectiveness of a novel method of delivering classwide literacy instruction in preschool. The need to improve preschool instruction with evidenced based techniques, especially around literacy instruction is warranted. Four preschool classrooms were involved in the study for a total of 95 students and 4 teachers. Data was collected using AIMSweb Letter Naming Fluency (LNF), AIMSweb Letter Sound Fluency (LSF), and a researcher-created accuracy probe. The classwide matching to sample instruction occurred four days a week for 3-6 minutes. It was implemented during opening circle time. Each session consisted of 1 letter that involved a series of steps that were completed within the matching to sample instructional technique. There were two matching to sample instructions delivered in a week: letter naming and letter sound. Each session consisted of a stimulus being presented with three comparative stimuli, a stimulus being paired with a verbal word, or a stimulus being paired with a verbal sound. Overall, A = print, B = picture, C = letter name, and D = letter sound. Results from the current study provide preliminary support for matching-to sample instruction to be used to improve letter name and sound acquisition, letter naming fluency, and letter sound fluency with preschool students. The current study highlights the effectiveness using scaffolding techniques, frequent practice opportunities, visual aids, and specific feedback when activating prior knowledge to teach an academic skill.

Committee: Tai Collins Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Renee Hawkins Ph.D. (Committee Member); Stephen Kroeger Ed.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Social Psychology

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2012, African-American and African Studies

This study on African naming practices during slavery and its aftermath examines the centrality of names and naming in creating, suppressing, retaining and reclaiming African identity and memory. Based on recent scholarly studies, it is clear that several elements of African cultural practices have survived the oppressive onslaught of slavery and European domination. However, most historical inquiries that explore African culture in the Americas have tended to focus largely on retentions that pertain to cultural forms such as religion, dance, dress, music, food, and language leaving out, perhaps, equally important aspects of cultural retentions in the African Diaspora, such as naming practices and their psychological significance. In this study, I investigate African names and naming practices on the African continent, the United States and the Caribbean, not merely as elements of cultural retention, but also as forms of resistance – and their importance to the construction of identity and memory for persons of African descent. As such, this study examines how European colonizers attacked and defiled African names and naming systems to suppress and erase African identity – since names not only aid in the construction of identity, but also concretize a people's collective memory by recording the circumstances of their experiences. Thus, to obliterate African collective memories and identities, the colonizers assigned new names to the Africans or even left them nameless, as a way of subjugating and committing them to perpetual servitude. In response, my research investigates how African descendants on the continent and throughout the Diaspora resisted this process of obliteration of their memories and how they deployed the practice of naming for survival in such a hostile environment. Therefore, this study not only focuses on the deliberate attempt made by European colonizers to obliterate African memory and instill a sense of shame within the African community, but a (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lupenga Mphande PhD (Advisor); Leslie Alexander PhD (Committee Member); Judson Jeffries PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures

The upheaval in Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union is seen in many aspects of the present cultural environment, including the influence of English upon the Russian language. This borrowing of ‘Americanisms' into the language is seen by many as a source of contamination of the purity of the Russian language, which has led to the federal government passing laws in an attempt to prevent it. For many people, however, the use of English, particularly in product and business names, is seen as a sign of international appeal.This study looks at business names in Tomsk, a city of approximately 500,000 people. I surveyed three major streets and collected the names of the businesses located on them. I categorized the businesses according to business type and the distance they are located from the center of the city. Afterwards, I analyzed each name for the presence of foreign words, morphemes, and graphic elements, and categorized each name into one of five categories according to the degree of foreignness or Russianness of the name. As this study shows, there are many factors that influence the choice of foreign or Russian names. This study examines these pragmatic factors in the context of the abovementioned Tomsk businesses and looks at demographics, culture, history and other factors that appear to be influencing which businesses are most likely to use English and other foreign languages in business naming.

Committee: Daniel Collins PhD (Advisor); Charles Gribble PhD (Committee Member); Terence Odlin PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2005, Industrial/Organizational Psychology (Arts and Sciences)

The purpose of this research was to assess the existence of attitudes and connotations toward email names, as well as to apply a theoretical framework for describing the process of how those attitudes may influence job related evaluations. Results from 2 studies using undergraduates confirmed the existence of various attitudes toward different email name-types, as well as the influence of those perceptions on evaluations of various selection criteria. These results suggested that individuals need to be aware of the potential impressions others have of them based on their email names. However, while results indicated that email name-type did not have an influence on interview decisions, the quality of individuals' resumes did affect whether or not an applicant was asked to return for an interview.

Committee: Paula Popovich (Advisor) Subjects: Psychology, Industrial

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2005, Geography (Arts and Sciences)

This study investigates the present day toponymns of Waterford County, Ireland. By using the Land Ordnance Survey of Ireland maps, a database was created with the place names of the county. This study draws upon both traditional and contemporary theories and methods in Geography to understand more fully the meaning behind the place names on a map. In the “traditional” sense, it focuses on investigating changes in the landscape wrought by humans through both time and space (the naming of places). In a more “contemporary” sense, it seeks to understand the power relationships and social struggles reflected in the naming of places and the geography of those names. As such, this study fills a void in the current toponymns and cartographic literature, which are both focused mainly on patterns of diffusion and power struggles in North America.

Committee: Timothy Anderson (Advisor) Subjects: Geography

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2005, Psychology

The present research investigates the relationship between facial features and a person's name. The stimuli for the present studies were generated by first having a set of participants create exemplar faces for a name. This was followed by another set of participants determining which of the exemplar faces were the most typical for the name category. Finally, those faces deemed as the most typical for the name category were morphed to create face-name prototypes. In Experiment 1, these face-name prototypes were used in a matching task in which participants were asked to match one name to each of these face-name prototypes. It is shown that participants are consistent at naming the name-prototypes based solely on the facial features. Experiment 2 utilized these same prototypes in a learning task and assigned names to the faces based on the frequency of naming from Experiment 1. Face-name pairs that were frequently matched in Experiment 1 were considered high Association Strength (AS) pairs and those pairings that were less frequently were considered low AS pairs. In this task, the participants were asked to learn face-name associations as quickly as possible. It was shown that participants learned face-name pairings that have a high AS faster than those whose pairings had a low AS. Taken together, these results suggest there is a more direct relationship between facial features and names than has been previously proposed (e.g., Bruce & Young, 1986; Valentine, 1991). Possible explanations for this effect are discussed.

Committee: Robin Thomas (Advisor) Subjects: Psychology, Cognitive