In Search of a Genre: An Analysis of Political Campaign Rhetoric Used in Swing Races in the 2018 Midterm Elections

This study examined one press release and one video ad from six Democratic candidates running for the United States Congress in swing states and districts in the 2018 midterm elections. The purpose of this study was to determine if the rhetoric used by Democratic candidates running for the U.S. Congress in swing races constitutes a specific genre of political communication. Generic criticism was employed as a theoretical frame to determine if there was a common genre within this situated political communication. In addition, Burke’s cluster criticism was used to provide a close reading of the texts to identify key themes in the rhetoric. The two methods suggested the possibility of the development of a genre of communication used by Democratic candidates running in swing races for the United States Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The rhetorical cluster analysis revealed that themes of justice, inclusivity, bipartisanship, people above politics, and independence were used strategically by all of the candidates included in the study, suggesting strategic thematic language use that may be employed to win over voters in swing districts in midterm elections. The paper upon which this poster was based was written for the Senior Seminar course in Communication Arts. The paper was competitively selected for and subsequently presented at the Northwest Communication Association Conference in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in April 2019

The Abbaco Tradition (1300-1500): its role in the development of European algebra

Abbaco algebra is a coherent tradition of algebraic problem solving mostly based in the merchant cities of fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italy. This period is roughly situated between two important works dealing with algebra: the Liber Abbaci by Fibonacci (1202) and the Summa di Arithmetica et Geometria by Lucca Pacioli (1492). Such continuous tradition of mathematical practice was hardly known before the first transcriptions of extant manuscripts by Gino Arrighi from the 1960’s and the ground-breaking work by Warren van Egmond (1980). After some decades of manuscript study and the recent assessment of Jens Høyrup (2007) we now have a better understanding of this tradition. In this paper we provide an overview of the basic characteristics of the abbaco tradition and discuss the role it played towards the new symbolic algebra as it emerged in sixteenth-century Europe. We argue that its influence on the sixteenth century has largely been ignored and that the new ars analytica from the French algebraists should be understood as establishing new foundations for the general practice of abbaco problem solving

Algebraic symbolism as a conceptual barrier in learning mathematics

The use of symbolism in mathematics is probably the mostly quoted reason people use for explaining their lack of understanding and difficulties in learning mathematics. We will consider symbolism as a conceptual barrier drawing on some recent findings in historical epistemology and cognitive psychology. Instead of relying on the narrow psychological interpretation of epistemic obstacles we use the barrier for situating symbolism in the ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’-debate. Drawing on a recent study within historical epistemology we show how early symbolism functioned in a way similar to concrete operational schemes. Furthermore we will discuss several studies from cognitive psychology which come to the conclusion that symbolism is not as abstract and arbitrary as one considers but often relies on perceptually organized grouping and concrete spatial relations. We will use operations on fractions to show that the reliance on concrete spatial operations also provides opportunities for teaching. We will conclude arguing that a better conceptual understanding of symbolism by teachers will prepare them for possible difficulties that students will be confronted with in the classroom