MangaGAN: Unpaired Photo-to-Manga Translation Based on The Methodology of Manga Drawing

Manga is a world popular comic form originated in Japan, which typically employs black-and-white stroke lines and geometric exaggeration to describe humans' appearances, poses, and actions. In this paper, we propose MangaGAN, the first method based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for unpaired photo-to-manga translation. Inspired by how experienced manga artists draw manga, MangaGAN generates the geometric features of manga face by a designed GAN model and delicately translates each facial region into the manga domain by a tailored multi-GANs architecture. For training MangaGAN, we construct a new dataset collected from a popular manga work, containing manga facial features, landmarks, bodies, and so on. Moreover, to produce high-quality manga faces, we further propose a structural smoothing loss to smooth stroke-lines and avoid noisy pixels, and a similarity preserving module to improve the similarity between domains of photo and manga. Extensive experiments show that MangaGAN can produce high-quality manga faces which preserve both the facial similarity and a popular manga style, and outperforms other related state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 17 page

Marks the Spot

This thesis is an investigation into the prtoblem of marketing for small businesses with little funds and means for advertisement. Past, present and predicted future methods of marketing prove there is room for improvement in affordability through existing advancements. Literature reviews and case studies explore the most lucrative ways forward. Research also indicates that large numbers of potential consumers are missed by small businesses due to their general lack of embracing newer communication technology such as store apps. This extra support measure provides users with notifications that highlight coupons and deals and has a proven record of success for larger companies with the resources to accommodate. Despite the hurdles of implementing the various forms of marketing, this thesis explores a solution by way of a mobile app to alleviate the burden of travelers finding smaller local businesses en route to a destination. This is due to the unrealistic nature of building and maintaining dedicated store apps, which is an undertaking that many small businesses are not built to maintain. To bridge the gap, it was deduced that an app for all businesses would be effective in reaching out to potential customers in an immediate area by way of GPS and geofencing. Additional research investigates driver safety in relation to mobile applications, which considers color, type, shapes and other aesthetics that can distract drivers from the road

Developing Tools to Utilize the Oregon State University Woody Plant Collection and Establish a Campus Arboretum

Oregon State University campus grounds have long been admired for their beauty and the diversity of over 65,000 individual woody plants that grace the 570 acres of campus. The woody plant collection has provided a living learning laboratory for the university and surrounding community for decades. The campus grounds include over 8,000 trees including many American elms that were planted over 100 years ago. The rhododendrons blooming in the spring brings many to campus to indulge and take photographs amongst the over 8,000 individual flowering shrubs and small trees of the collection. The campus has long been regarded as a horticultural paradise and an attraction to many students, faculty, staff, and alumni. The ability to tour and see mature specimens and how they complement a landscape is an added benefit when students are learning about plants and when planning or installing a garden. To bring awareness to the collection and create opportunities for public engagement, we sought to establish the Corvallis campus as an arboretum and secure ArbNet Arboretum Accreditation. While botanical gardens and arboreta are often affiliated with colleges and universities, there are many institutions who have incredible woody plant collections that are not well acknowledged. This project examines the role of public horticulture at colleges and universities and the importance of woody plant collections in higher educational settings. For those who are seeking to establish an arboretum and gain ArbNet Accreditation, this research will present the steps used by the Oregon State University Campus Arboretum (OSUCA) to develop an interactive map using ArcGIS Online and interpretive signage for public engagement, compose a strategic plan and living collections policy, and the process of OSUCA obtaining ArbNet Level II Arboretum Accreditation. From this research, the goal is for other institutions to be able to bring attention to their woody plant collections through creating publicly available maps, interpretive signage, and to provide a template for completing the criteria necessary for ArbNet Arboretum Accreditation

The Business of the Girl: Celebrity and the Professionalization of Girlhood in Early Twenty-First Century Media Culture

The achieving “can-do” girl, who thrives in her personal, academic, and aspirational endeavors, emerged in response to self-help crisis literature of the 1990s urging mothers to manage their daughters’ low self-esteem. However, even as media industries have adopted the successful girl subject in popular film, television, and digital marketing campaigns, public conversations of tween and teenage girls still identify rising levels of anxiety and self-doubt that diminish girls’ confidence well into adulthood. Responding to what critics call the “confidence gap,” girl culture of the twenty-first century has organized itself around the affordances of social media and digital celebrity in the creation of a professionalized girl self-brand. This project addresses the media discourses of confidence and anxiety that shape expectations of girlhood achievement and examines the use of celebrity as a tool of professionalization in the reproduction of race and class hierarchies under neoliberal capitalism. This project explores four modes of cultural production that demonstrate what I call “the professional lifestyling of the self” that invoke the practice of celebrity and branding in the construction of the professional girl subjectivity: lifestyle media featuring mothers managing their daughters’ entertainment careers; girl prodigies and performers competing on reality talent shows; girl influencers building their business on YouTube and Instagram; and girl activists negotiating humanitarian agendas in networked microcelebrity spaces. Critical to each mode is how celebrity reinforces confidence, authenticity, and relatability in the creation of a professionalized girl subject who acts as a point of stabilization during uncertain economic times. The chapters survey the progression of girlhood in her professionalization, from her initial appointment as daughter carrying on the mother’s postfeminist legacy, to agent of social change navigating the pressures of promoting her cause in a commodity culture. Along the way, the girl learns to brand personal obstacles, insecurities, and anxieties as part of her authentic journey to professional achievement. I argue that this procession, as it operates within the surveillance framework of media convergence, reveals that attaining confidence is a commercial endeavor rather than a feminist one that promises social and economic independence while maintaining structural inequalities. This dissertation seeks to understand digital celebrity not just as “a pedagogical tool in the discursive production” of the girl, as P. David Marshall has argued, but as a professional aid in the construction of the gendered, racialized, and classed girl who can prosper in the shifting labor economy of the early twenty-first century. Girlhood relies on the technologies of branding and promotion to reimagine, rather than close, the confidence gap by assigning cultural value to traits like low self-worth that were previously blamed for holding girls back. This project ultimately interrogates how the commercial industries conceptualize the girl as a business whose confidence and anxiety are managed and whose work is crucial to the regulation of a capitalist society

The Construction of an exhibition within architecture culture deconstructivist architecture, The Museum of Modern Art, 1988

The 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, was a minor exhibition that forced architecture to change directions. The tenweek exhibition showed ten projects by seven architects, staged in three galleries. Polemics surrounded the exhibition. These polemics, coupled with Johnson’s reputation and the extreme formal reduction of the show, fueled interest within the press. The exhibition received more than double the press of any previous architecture exhibition at MoMA and up to five times that of the other four exhibitions within the Gerald D. Hines Interests Program in Architecture. The timing of the exhibition was integral to its effect. It coincided with the proliferation of architecture exhibitions and museums across America and Europe. They reflected pluralistic and historical positions in architecture. New technologies and the media as the message reflected a broader cultural conditions. They entered into the production and circulation of architecture and the exhibition. Deconstructivist Architecture is often thought to have dealt a death knell to postmodern architecture, despite that “there has never been a consensus as to what Post-modern architecture is.”1 Yet beyond the beginning or end of a style or movement, could Deconstructivist Architecture be considered instead, as Sylvia Lavin suggests in her 1988 review of the exhibition, “as a critical methodology and analytical strategy

Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms & Practices is a volume of essays that provides a detailed account of born-digital literature by artists and scholars who have contributed to its birth and evolution. Rather than offering a prescriptive definition of electronic literature, this book takes an ontological approach through descriptive exploration, treating electronic literature from the perspective of the digital humanities (DH)––that is, as an area of scholarship and practice that exists at the juncture between the literary and the algorithmic. The domain of DH is typically segmented into the two seemingly disparate strands of criticism and building, with scholars either studying the synthesis between cultural expression and screens or the use of technology to make artifacts in themselves. This book regards electronic literature as fundamentally DH in that it synthesizes these two constituents. Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities provides a context for the development of the field, informed by the forms and practices that have emerged throughout the DH moment, and finally, offers resources for others interested in learning more about electronic literature

Stuck in the Last Ice Age: Tracing the Role of Document Design in the Teaching Materials of Writing Courses

Teaching materials play vital roles in writing classrooms, yet they are understudied genres in English Studies. Teaching materials are inherently visual genres; the document design choices made by teachers illuminate values held about writing and writing classrooms. They are understudied genres, in part, because of the feminized position of composition. A professional writing investigation of the document design of teaching materials offers opportunities to rectify this. I developed a technofeminine genre tracing methodology focused on exploring the visual convention choices made by teachers and how these visual conventions are interpreted by students across the three levels of activity: the activity-driven macroscopic level, the action-based mesoscopic level, and the operation-embedded microscopic level. Two case studies were conducted with two composition teachers and one section of composition students each. Teachers were interviewed, observed, and their documents for this section were collected. Students were observed and surveyed twice during the semester. By considering how external practical, discourse community, and rhetorical factors influence teaching material design at the macroscopic and mesoscopic levels, I found that this resulted in a deep grip of print based, microscopic choices. One external practical factor, technology, is changing the evolutionary path of teaching materials. It is a messy evolution during which teachers are trying to blend traditional teaching material design with new exigencies and technologies. Conclusions indicate that we cab address the feminized and understudied position of teaching materials and their design by making use of the principles of deconstruction by asymmetries as articulated by Louise Wetherbee Phelps. This schema of conditions, structures, and exemplification considers what paths forward exist. Institutional critique of the materiality of teaching materials in local contexts is a means to promote the conditions for critical collaboration within writing programs. Pedagogical applications of usability and rhetorical design to teaching materials, as Susan Miller-Cochran and Rochelle Rodrigo advocate for online writing instruction, can create structures that nurture and sustain teachers and students in writing programs. Finally, ethical leadership and community initiatives are intrinsically necessary to establish and maintain the kind of relationship building necessary to promote active and evolving design work