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

As virtual space, the internet can be understood theologically through the doctrinal loci of the incarnation and the church. These two doctrines pervade both scholarly and ecclesial discussions of technology and the internet to date, and remain the central doctrinal categories with which theologians should assess internet culture. In its broader sacramental imagination and its ecclesiology, the church relies on virtual space insofar as it relies on the productive tension between presence and absence. Furthermore, the social possibilities of the internet afford the church great opportunity for building a social context that allows the living out of Eucharistic logic learned in properly liturgical moments.

Committee: Vincent Miller Ph.D. (Advisor); William Portier Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jana Bennett Ph.D. (Committee Member); Angela Ann Zukowski D. Min. (Committee Member); Sandra Yocum Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Multimedia Communications; Religion; Theology

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2015, English (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation is a study of Wikipedia's collaborative, open access culture and the opportunities for writing pedagogy it provides. Because the encyclopedia showcases productive writing processes in radically transparent ways, Wikipedia enables rich opportunities for students to observe, practice, and learn about writing. Wikipedia can help students gain social and procedural writing knowledge as well as more traditional learning outcomes related to research, writing and rhetoric. Engaging students in Wikipedia's interactive community can also lead to an increase in rhetorical knowledge as students practice negotiation and collaboration with authorities outside the “traditional” classroom. Additionally, the encyclopedia provides opportunities for cultural studies projects that involve students in the recognition of identity politics of representation and cultural marginalization as they work to rectify missing articles and topics that are underrepresented. Discussion of these opportunities provides a range of pedagogical insights into how writing instructors can approach and teach with the encyclopedia, by asking students to join the Wikipedia community and—through their writing—improve existing articles and create new ones. Such insights are supported by three information-rich classroom case studies, made available through a qualitative research design that emphasizes student and instructor experience by re-creating classroom contexts. In addition to asserting and describing the pedagogical benefits of Wikipedia writing assignments, these classroom studies interrogate the cultural politics of access and representation that emerge when students and others try to join and write in this community. Despite its ambitions for global representation and its open access editorial ethos, Wikipedia's project is hindered by problems of homogenous editorship, troubling issues of editorial access, and gaps in coverage of already marginalized topics. Examination of how these i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Albert Rouzie PhD (Advisor); Mara Holt PhD (Committee Member); Jennie Nelson PhD (Committee Member); Howard Welser PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Composition; Cultural Anthropology; Educational Theory; Pedagogy; Rhetoric; Teaching; Web Studies

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2013, Comparative Studies

Given the world is increasingly driven by technology, it should come as no shock that art museums are working to increase their online presence. Many museums have maintained websites since the earliest days of the World Wide Web, but recently these museums are seeking to digitize their collections in order to make them publicly available for Internet users. While smaller museums struggle to find the finances and expertise to commit to this task, larger institutions like The Metropolitan Museum of Art maintain the financial wherewithal to begin such massive undertakings. However, the question remains as to why any museum might wish to make their highly-prized collections publicly available online. The impetus behind museums' “going online” results from the European histories of aristocracy and connoisseurship from which the museum emerged, and the struggle of American museums to make good on their missions to service “the people” in spite of such historical influence. The Internet has been viewed both skeptically and liberally as a means to complete this mission, but the consequences of “going online” remain intertwined in the present formation of the public's understanding of the Internet its liberal use of content. At best, it is currently possible to look at the previous trajectories of both these institutions, the museum and the Internet, in order to begin to tease apart some of the merging areas of discourse. At first glance, it may seem that the two are not so different, which may in fact prove true, but even the most gentle investigation under the surface of these two institutions will show great dissimilarities in their discourse and methods of control. The Internet and the museum may in fact be at ideological odds with one another, and yet that has not prevented their inevitable merger. The museum has traditionally functioned by leveraging controlled access to the content of its collections as legally manifested through copyright, while the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Philip Armstrong PhD (Advisor); Kris Paulsen PhD (Committee Member); Allison Fish PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education; Arts Management; Comparative; Technology

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2022, Art History (Fine Arts)

This research follows the development of two image-based internet memes, the Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man meme and the Tradwife meme, to interrogate how the spread and reproduction of image-based internet memes on social media platforms affects the images' retention of meaning. In order to apply a combined historical, semiological, and media-centric approach, this thesis follows the historical evolution of each meme alongside two theories: Bradley Wiggins' genre development of memes and Jean Baudrillard's simulacra. The historical account for each meme begins with the primary image and follows its transformation into an image-based internet meme according to the genre development of memes, demonstrating its initial role as spreadable media, to emergent meme, and finally, to full-fledged internet meme. Alongside that development, the process is compared to the developmental steps of Baudrillard's simulacra to utilize Baudrillard's theory to understand how images separate from their original meanings in mass reproduction. Image-based internet memes are connected to Baudrillard's simulacra because they both feature a dissociation of meanings and mass reproduction on media platforms. However, there is a distinction between the kind of media which Baudrillard references in his theory of simulacra and the kind of media internet memes developed on. Due to the mirrored processes of internet meme development and simulacra development, but the distinction between the type of medias, I argue that image-based internet memes form a new kind of simulacra.

Committee: Jennie Klein (Advisor); Karen Riggs (Committee Member); Samuel Dodd (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Communication; Mass Communications; Mass Media

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2020, Geography

User-generated data are the key to access and engagement in the modern digital ecosystem, shaping not only the ways we interact with platforms and applications but increasingly how we move through the physical world as well. The scope and magnitude of what data enables is matched only by the diversity and complexity of ways that internet users can generate it. Thus, the data-driven shaping, coercion, and regulation of behaviors by the digital traces of individuals movements and actions is a key component of algorithmic governance, within which race acts as a determining factor of differentiation and intensity. To that end, examining how Black people are surveilled, coerced, and quantified within digital ecosystems prefigures how engagement is eventually shaped for all users, and in many cases serves as impetus to enroll non-Black individuals into regimes of control requires a reckoning with the foundational influence of anti-Blackness on the internet. It is not enough to look at the data and formulate hypotheses about what actions could have produced it, if we do not understand those behaviors as rooted in an individual's awareness of their specific context and identity. The secretive, “black box” nature of these algorithms means that users know little, if anything, about how they function, their outputs, their priorities, or their inaccuracies. Yet how individuals perceive their own position within digital ecosystems, and conceive of what responses are available to them, are widely divergent. To discern how individuals perceive their ability to exert control over their data and privacy, it is necessary to first understand how user engagement with digital platforms relies on asymmetries in experience, knowledge, and access in order to facilitate the production and collection of user data.

Committee: Nancy Ettlinger (Advisor); Madhumita Dutta (Committee Member); Roselyn Lee-Won (Committee Member); Treva Lindsey (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Dance Studies

Since its premiere, YouTube has rapidly emerged as the most important venue shaping popular dance practitioners and consumers, introducing paradigm shifts in the ways dances are learned, practiced, and shared. YouTube is a technological platform, an economic system, and a means of social affiliation and expression. In this dissertation, I contribute to ongoing debates on the social, political, and economic effects of technological change by focusing on the bodily and emotional labor performed and archived on the site in videos, comments sections, and advertisements. In particular I look at comments and fan video as social paratexts which shape dance reception and production through policing genre, citationality, and legitimacy; position studio dance class videos as an Internet screendance genre which entextualizes the pedagogical context through creative documentation; and analyze the use of dance in online advertisements to promote identity-based consumption. Taken together, these inquiries show that YouTube perpetuates and reshapes established modes and genres of production, distribution, and consumption. These phenomena require an analysis that accounts for their multivalence and the ways the texts circulating on YouTube subvert existing categories, binaries, and hierarchies. A cyclical exchange—between perpetuation and innovation, subculture and pop culture, amateur and professional, the subversive and the neoliberal—is what defines YouTube and the investigation I undertake in this dissertation.

Committee: Harmony Bench PhD (Advisor); Katherine Borland PhD (Committee Member); Karen Eliot PhD (Committee Member); Ryan Skinner PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Communication; Dance; Ethnic Studies; Intellectual Property; Mass Media; Performing Arts; Technology; Web Studies

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2016, English

Imagine if This Were in Comic Sans is a collection of poems that acts as an exploration of scripted womanhood and sexuality as well as an examination of the physical and emotional body as a site of both trauma and desire. With no formal sections, the collection is composed of poems along with sparse images and cellphone screenshots that deal with the admiration of viscera, tortured movements through the mundane, and the warped filters trauma presses upon women's desires. As a corrective to the assumptions that equate women's emotional expression with melodrama and sentimentality, the work adopts a deliberately melodramatic, even grotesque tonality. The conversational style of the speaker in these poems is intended to solicit the reader's empathy and/or identification with painful, sometimes shocking issues, traumas, and desires. Visuals added throughout embody the social, sexual subconscious that surrounds the speaker.

Committee: Cathy Wagner (Committee Chair) Subjects: Gender Studies; Mental Health; Multimedia Communications; Personal Relationships; Psychology; Recreation; Theater

BA, Oberlin College, 2015, Comparative American Studies

This paper provides an overview of the resources that exist for LGBTQ youth in the Cleveland area and uses the Queers and Allies Club at Oberlin High School (Oberlin, OH) as a case study in community formation among teenagers who identify as LGBTQ or as an ally to the LGBTQ community. Each chapter addresses potential sources of support, including schools, national organizations, and the Internet while presenting opportunities for improvement in each realm, demonstrating that while some LGBTQ youth resources exist, they are designed for youth in urban areas, leaving students in non-urban communities without access to community or information.

Committee: Wendy Kozol (Advisor); Evangeline Heiliger (Committee Member); Meredith Raimondo (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Education; Education Policy; Educational Sociology; Gender; Gender Studies; Sociology; Web Studies; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2006, American Culture Studies/Communication

"IRL (In Real Life): Breaking Down The Binary Of Online Versus Offline Social Interaction" examines the framework of "real versus virtual" that is often applied to studies of online social activity. This framework is often employed as a default in new media research, influencing a number of areas including the ongoing debate among scholars about whether or not the word "community" can be justly applied to a virtual group. The difficulty lies in the fact that few researchers have examined the framework in a critical context, in particular in the context of our larger narrative of the history of mass media technologies. This research begins with a detailed discussion of the real/virtual binary as a theoretical construct, in order to see if the idea of a sharp separation between online and offline activity is supportable. Having broken down the binary construct, this work turns to a case study of an online community known as "the Bronze," which existed from 1997 to 2001. By utilizing interviews and archival information, the case study examines the ways in which Internet users combine online and offline social activity seamlessly, the ways Internet forums can become integrated into daily activity rather than exist as exotic oases away from normal routines, and concludes with examples of the community organizing to deal with unwanted behavior, and also with a discussion of what the risk of deception in an online space means for the legitimacy of online social interaction.

Committee: Radhika Gajalla (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2013, Popular Culture

Thinspiration images, meant to inspire weight-loss, proliferate online through platforms that encourage the circulation of user-generated content. Despite numerous alarmist critiques in mass media about thinspiration and various academic studies investigating 'pro-anorexia' sites, surprisingly little attention has been given to the processes of creation and the symbolic potential of thinspiration. This thesis analyzes the formal hybridity of thinspiration, and its use as an expressive medium. The particularities of thinspiration (including its visual characteristics, creative processes, and exhibition) may be considered carefully constructed instances of self-representation, hinging on the expression of beliefs regarding the mind and body. While these beliefs are deeply entrenched in popular body management discourse, they also tend to rely on traditional dualist ideologies. Rather than simply emphasizing slenderness or reiterating standard assumptions about beauty, thinspiration often evokes pain and sadness, and employs truisms about the transcendence of flesh and rebellion against social constraints. By harnessing individualist discourse and the values of mind/body dualism, thinspiration becomes a space in which people struggling with disordered eating and body image issues may cast themselves as active agents—contrary to images of eating disorders proffered by popular and medical discourse.

Committee: Marilyn Motz (Advisor); Rebecca Kinney (Committee Member); Jeremy Wallach (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Art Criticism; Communication; Folklore; Gender Studies; Health; Multimedia Communications; Social Research; Web Studies; Womens Studies