Mobility and the digital page

As digital media and computers have become essential components in contemporary communication, the field of composition and rhetoric must re-evaluate its focus in composition classrooms due to increasing student literacy in multimedia environments. This dissertation investigates how students compose multimodal composition in a research study of a First Year Composition course. Students in this study created comic books on an issue of social concern and were surveyed on their experience both using computers to write before entering college and using a computer to create comic books during the assignment. This study informs the process of digital mobility, a process of conceptual and performative interaction on the digital screen, that students undergo in creating multimodal composition. This study also undergirds a need to expand the field of composition to accommodate such multimodal composition and give students increased opportunities to make meaning in other modes beyond alphabetic text while studying the ways students compose in a digital interface

Kinesthetic Empathy

Kinesthetic empathy is a term that talks about our ability as humans to feel each other\u27s pain. We have an incredible understanding and connectivity with people we hold close in our lives. The body of work for my MFA Thesis Exhibition explores some aspects of these phenomena by illustrating emotional relationships in glass sculpture. There are many different ways that people empathize with one another, therefore, different aspects and rituals of commiserating are explored to better understand why we can feel another person\u27s pain without physically experiencing it. I have a very specific connection with this type of empathy; my younger sister, Leigh, has been sick her whole life. While Leigh appears healthy and well, she has a multitude of autoimmune diseases that have required her to be on chemotherapeutic medication since she was very young. She feels severe physical pain everyday of her life. Growing up as her older sister, I felt compelled to protect her. In this lifelong attempt to protect her emotionally and physically, I have experienced a huge range of emotions related to her pain and health struggles. While many people feel sympathy for Leigh and her health issues, I think that our strong connection as siblings has made our relationship unique. While most elder siblings take a defensive stance with the younger, I have found my feelings to be more akin to survivor\u27s guilt. Through the use of portraiture with elements of the grotesque, I show a relatable person with whom one would feel a connection to, as well as a physical deformity that may be difficult to look at otherwise. The contrast of combining realistic bodily features assuming impossible physical distortions will pull the viewer into the work to investigate something seemingly invented, yet poetically relatable to very real human sensations

Choice of library preparation affects sequence quality, genome assembly, and precise in silico prediction of virulence genes in shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli.

Whole genome sequencing (WGS) provides essential public health information and is used worldwide for pathogen surveillance, epidemiology, and source tracking. Foodborne pathogens are often sequenced using rapid library preparation chemistries based on transposon technology; however, this method may miss random segments of genomes that can be important for accurate downstream analyses. As new technologies become available, it may become possible to achieve better overall coverage. Here we compare the sequence quality obtained using libraries prepared from the Nextera XT and Nextera DNA Prep (Illumina, San Diego, CA) chemistries for 31 Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) O121:H19 strains, which had been isolated from flour during a 2016 outbreak. The Nextera DNA Prep gave superior performance metrics including sequence quality, assembly quality, uniformity of genome coverage, and virulence gene identification, among other metrics. Comprehensive detection of virulence genes is essential for making educated assessments of STECs virulence potential. The phylogenetic SNP analysis did not show any differences in the variants detected by either library preparation method which allows isolates prepared from either library method to be analysed together. Our comprehensive comparison of these chemistries should assist researchers wishing to improve their sequencing workflow for STECs and other genomic risk assessments

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The members of the committee appointed to examine the dissertation o