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Recent Submissions
The Inauguration of Lawrence A. Ianni As The Fifth Chancellor of the University of Minnesota, Duluth
(1987-10-30) University of Minnesota, Duluth
Navigating the Evaluation Theory Labyrinth: Using Nonlinear Program Theory Modelling to Evaluate Evaluation Theory
(2024-04) Flicker, Erin
Evaluation theory has often lacked alignment with practical evaluation activities, leading to assertions that “program evaluation is … (unfortunately) a largely atheoretical activity” (Wortman, 1983). This dissertation addresses this gap by utilizing evaluation tools to assess evaluation theory, specifically focusing on the Action Model/Change Model of understanding program theory and its relevance to evaluation theory. Through interviews with Dr. Chen, the originator of the model, a qualitative content analysis of academic literature on Values Engaged, Educative Evaluation (VEE), and the development of a VEE Action Model/Change Model, this study explores the applicability of the model to evaluation theory.Semi-structured interviews with practicing evaluators were conducted to assess the utility of the VEE Action Model/Change Model, resulting in a deep understanding of VEE theory and its practical implications. Initial feedback indicated positive responses, highlighting the model’s potential to clarify evaluation theory, align practice with theoretical frameworks, and validate theories in practice. This research represents a foundational step towards creating a more robust understanding of evaluation theory amongst practitioners lays the groundwork for future research to further explore and refine evaluation theory. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, this study contributes to the ongoing development and effective implementation of evaluation theory in diverse contexts.
Exploring the Experiences of Bereaved Parents Who Have Created Digital Memorials
(2024-07) Fraher, Robert
The project described in this document seeks to understand the experiences of bereaved parents (N=8) who have used digital media to memorialize their deceased children. The project considers how these bereaved parents have used digital media to create memorials, what their experiences have been, as well as why they have done so. The document includes a literature review to establish a foundation for understanding contemporary ideas and practices related to digital memorialization. This review addresses key ideas related to bereavement studies, provides an understanding of interaction design as a disciplinary context, and considers the ways bereavement-related ideas are being incorporated into research within this discipline. The document also contains a discussion of the phenomenological methodology used in the project. This discussion describes the historical development, philosophical basis, and practical methods of the methodology. The document proceeds with an explanation of the study’s findings. These findings are presented as the master themes that were identified through our analysis of the participants’ interviews. These themes address the technology and media types participants have used to memorialize their children, the ordinary and extraordinary experiences they have endured in the process, and their rationales related to meaning-making and healing for doing so. The document then discusses these themes in light of relevant literature. This discussion includes the research areas of grieving patterns, continuing bonds, meaning-reconstruction, thanatosensitive design, and memorialization. The discussion of each research area includes brief speculations on the implications of the study for future related research. The document concludes with an explanation of the limitations of the study and a reflection on my experience conducting it.
A Rebuild of History: Anno Hideaki's Shin Godzilla and Evangelion
(2024) Fong, Tobias
After the Great Hanshin Earthquake and Tokyo subway sarin gas attack by Aum Shinrikyo in 1995, Japanese society was thrown into a turmoil as cracks in their postwar social institutions were revealed, and the anxiety and uncertainty arising from these tragedies, along with the long economic recession, manifested in many narratives – with new genres such as sekai kei emerging to indicate a shift toward more inward consciousness. Furthermore, the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 once again rocked the nation, and the effectiveness and competency of the government is brought into question as it struggles to deal with the disaster, revealing more flaws in their contemporary systems. In my case study of Anno Hideaki’s films, including the original Shin Seiki Evangelion television series in 1995, Shin Godzilla in 2016, and the Rebuild of Evangelion movies from 2007-2021, I intend to illustrate how he reinterprets and rebuilds the historical narratives of Japan after the respective crises, which he pinpoints as historical ruptures. Again, Anno rebuilds historical narratives in the wake of the disaster as an attempt to both tackle the social anxieties that arose, as well as foster a cooperative and community-focused spirit at the grassroots level. Despite Anno’s critique of the government and consumerist culture, his “Rebuilds” tend to construct nationalist narratives to promote cooperation and grassroots activities as near utopian alternatives to the aging and outdated social institutions.By tracing the differences in the media Anno Hideaki has produced over the years, I intend to locate historical ruptures emerging out of his work, and demonstrate how his rebuilds are metacommentaries of the process of historical revisionism, as well as the historiography of apocalypticism.
Perceptual Categorization and Neural Representations of the Human Voice
(2024-08) Gao, Zi
The human voice is a highly relevant and social auditory stimulus. The questions of whether the voice forms a special category in auditory perception and, if so, how the brain’s responses to voice are different from those to non-voice sounds have been a central topic of voice perception research. This dissertation explores the distinction between voice and non-voice processing in different domains and via different modalities. In the first study, both musicians with absolute pitch ability and average listeners were shown to perform worse with voice than non-voice stimuli in tasks that required fine-tuned pitch processing. This voice-disadvantage effect stands in contrast to several previously reported voice advantages and suggests that differences in processing are unlikely to be due to an overall enhancement in the processing of voice as compared to non-voice. Instead, the direction and degree of voice-related enhancement may be feature- or task-dependent. While the existing literature on voice perception has focused on comparing the responses to predefined categories of voice and non-voice stimuli, it remains unknown whether the perceptual boundary between these categories is fixed or flexible. The second study investigated the existence and extent of perceptual shifts in voice/non-voice categorization following either voice or non-voice contexts. Contrastive adaptation effects were observed following repeated exposure to either voice or musical instrument sounds, such that ambiguous sounds, created by morphing vowels with instrumental tones, were more likely to be reported as a voice after exposure to musical instruments, and vice versa. The third study demonstrated that the contrastive adaptation effects generalized to the more ecologically valid contexts of spoken sentences and melodies, but not to contexts of non-speech human vocalizations or non-pitched percussion sounds. The fourth and final study of this thesis explored neural correlates of voice and non-voice categorization using electroencephalography (EEG) under passive (unattended) listening conditions. Average differences in the morphology of the EEG waveforms were observed between vowel and instrument sounds. Using an oddball paradigm, a mismatch-negativity (MMN) was observed for rare instrument sounds in the context of vowel sounds, but not vice versa, providing only weak evidence for pre-attentive categorization. Finally, although the mean EEG waveform in response to ambiguous morphed voice-instrument sounds was not substantially affected by whether the morphed sound was presented in the context of voice or instrument sounds, trial-by-trial categorization based on logistic regression models performed at above-chance levels, suggesting that the EEG responses to the target sounds were affected by the context. Overall, the studies in this thesis provide us with a new understanding of how voice and non-voice sounds are perceived and processed by the human auditory system.