Documenting Student Life: Using Omeka To Connect Students To The University Archives

Many institutional archives struggle to gain and maintain student participation in documenting the student experience. The history, images, and records of students and their various organizations are fundamental to the narrative of the university. Capturing the experiences of students and campus life is a difficult task as students create organizations, plan and attend events, and maintain a social media presence, all of which are rarely documented in university archives. At this institution, the Special Collections department wanted to increase students’ use of services and resources, and increase student donations to the archives to grow student-centered collections

Revisioning History: A Rhetorical Redesign of the Charleston Museum

The Charleston Museum has the distinction of being the oldest museum in the United States, founded in 1773 and still operating today. It was begun as a branch of the Charleston Library Society and soon grew to be a significant institution in Southern and American scientific discovery and research. Over the 225 years of its existence, it has amassed an impressive collection of natural history specimens, as well as rare artifacts of Lowcountry history and culture. Unfortunately, the exhibits have been neglected since their most recent installment (roughly 20 years ago) and are in need of visual and ideological revision. The revision is based on the rich history of the Charleston Museum, several key professional communications and rhetorical theories, and current trends in museum design. Four sections of the main exhibit area are addressed: Colonial, Years Surrounding the Civil War (The South Carolina Lowcountry, Halls I and II), Nature, and The Early Years. Each section is examined using description and images taken in the museum, and applied to the professional communications and rhetorical theories previously discussed. The result of this examination is a workable set of suggestions which the museum may choose to implement within the exhibit space in order to make it a more inclusive, visually pleasing, and educational exhibit

Multimodal mapping: Using mind maps to negotiate emerging professional communication practices and identity in higher education

Mind or concept maps have long been viewed as helpful tools to plan texts. The pedagogical focus is often focused on the end product as material artefact, with less pedagogical or assessment attention being paid to the process of mind mapping. A process-product approach to text and text-in-use can fulfil a variety of pedagogical goals that allow participants in a professional communication course to collaboratively negotiate meaning-making. By presenting mind maps in class and receiving immediate peer feedback, students have the opportunity to redesign their work to enhance understanding. This article uses a multimodal social semiotic approach as well as the notion of authorial stance (defined multimodally) to analyse a mind map, as both artefact and presentation. The analysis shows how a particular student transforms her work and thinking during in-class engagement. Besides turn-taking and experiential participation as communicator and audience, this negotiation of meaning-making contributes to graduate work-readiness. We argue that these scaffolding and scaffolded activities act to engage student identity formation as emerging professionals for the workplace. 

A CleanRoom approach to bring your own apps

Today, on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, hundreds of thousands of software apps provide useful services to users. Users use these apps to search and browse the web, perform financial transactions, emailing, among other functions. Besides, these apps use cloud services which gives the users the flexibility to access them from anywhere and from any device. Because of the rich functionality of these apps and ease of use of mobile devices, users (employees) often want to use their devices and preferred apps at their workplace. However, these apps not only pose risk to user's private data but also to enterprise data, when users use them within an enterprise network. For one thing, these apps come from hundreds and thousands of different app publishers, where all of them may not be trustworthy. Second, apps often need user's private data such as location, contact list, photos among others and use remote cloud to carry out their operations. In the process apps may leak a user's private or enterprise confidential data to a third party. Current practices to prevent such leaks through user enabled app permissions fall short because often user does not understand these permissions. Besides, even if a company's "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) policies mitigate the risk of device compromise with enterprise-approved password policies, remote wipe capabilities, and OS security upgrade policies, the apps on those devices pose their own risks. This thesis presents CleanRoom, a new app platform that prevents apps from leaking the data entrusted to them. It does not rely on users to make good decisions about Privacy, and enables enterprises to allow its employees to use their own devices and bring their preferred apps to work.Computer Science

Progress Notes

https://scholarlyworks.lvhn.org/progress_notes/1045/thumbnail.jp

Accessible PDFs : applying artificial intelligence for automated remediation of STEM PDFs

People with visual impairments use assistive technology, e.g., screen readers, to navigate and read PDFs. However, such screen readers need extra information about the logical structure of the PDF, such as the reading order, header levels, and mathematical formulas, described in readable form to navigate the document in a meaningful way. This logical structure can be added to a PDF with tags. Creating tags for a PDF is time-consuming, and requires awareness and expert knowledge. Hence, most PDFs are left untagged, and as a result, they are poorly readable or unreadable for people who rely on screen readers. STEM documents are particularly problematic with their complex document structure and complicated mathematical formulae. These inaccessible PDFs present a major barrier for people with visual impairments wishing to pursue studies or careers in STEM fields, who cannot easily read studies and publications from their field. The goal of this Ph.D. is to apply artificial intelligence for document analysis to reasonably automate the remediation process of PDFs and present a solution for large mathematical formulae accessibility in PDFs. With these new methods, the Ph.D. research aims to lower barriers to creating accessible scientific PDFs, by reducing the time, effort, and expertise necessary to do so, ultimately facilitating greater access to scientific documents for people with visual impairments

Visualizing Digital Identity

We cannot see what our digital identity looks like or view what it says about our behavior, feelings, or actions that are stored online. The data that is collected by surveillance from our smartphones build a fragmented and distorted reflection of ourselves. This stockpile of our data and this mirrored self it creates have become an increasingly valuable commodity that fuels the surveillance economy. While the existence of these datasets is not always obvious, they are attainable by request while the reflection of yourself they create is a heavily guarded secret. The digital identity created by this collection of data is explored through visual communication design. Datasets were acquired by applications such as Google, Spotify and Instagram from my smartphone. With this information I explore if design methodology can be applied to create a representation of my digital identity, and what critical reflections can these representations reveal about my digital identity? New processes were explored by using researching through design. In this process, the disconnections between concepts contained within the topic of digital surveillance and digital identity are analyzed. The scope of the project and the visualizations move through cycles of simplification as they narrow towards a place where a reflection can be made. These visualizations use Methodology from Surrealism and Discursive Design in their process and reflection. This recounts my research through design, and explores visualization of digital identity through using design as a medium for understanding. The visualizations move in a timeline through a series of iterative explorations. Each iteration contains its own context, process, and reflection. The iterative exploration moves towards understanding the digital identity by approaching the subject from multiple perspectives and executions of design. A theme of a distorted and fragmented reflection appears as the visualizations evolve in their process of iteration. The resulting understanding of a digital identity may never be finalized, but the resulting discourse invited through exploration becomes subjective reflections. This understanding of our fragmented and distorted reflections of our digital identity opens possibilities for further research.Master of Design, Visual CommunicationMAV