Health Reform Implementation Analysis: A Guide to Policy Development for Geriatric Care Planning, Integration and Evaluation

In the context of health care delivery for senior citizens, this research utilizes three studies that examine the development and implementation of health policy and the factors that can directly or indirectly impact the effective delivery of health services to senior citizens. It utilizes three essays employing mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) methods including semi structured interviews, multiple regression and partial least squares structural equation modelling to examine the extent to which the implementation of health services delivered attributes of primary and integrated care to seniors. The two essays identified methods, approaches and strategies of integrated care relevant to the development of policy that can be successfully implemented when the contextual issues that older people consider to be important in maintaining their functional capabilities and their motivation to improve health as perceived by them are addressed. Consequent upon the results from these studies, the third essay examines the methodological issues on integrated geriatric care implementation when guidelines for effective policy development identified were not followed. By highlighting the relationship between effective policy and patient satisfaction, these three essays' recommended approach enhances the theory of health design that confirms that theoretical models of primary care must incorporate the system, process and …
Date: August 2020
Creator: Abah, Theresa
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library
Stimulus Control Effects of Changes in Schedules of Reinforcement (open access)

Stimulus Control Effects of Changes in Schedules of Reinforcement

Sometimes, changes in consequences are accompanied by a clear stimulus change explicitly arranged by the experimenter. Other times when new consequences are in effect, there is little or no accompanying stimulus change explicitly arranged by the experimenter. These differences can be seen in the laboratory as multiple (signaled) schedules and mixed (unsignaled) schedules. The current study used college students and a single-subject design to examine the effects of introducing signaled and unsignaled schedules, and the transitions between them. In one phase, a card was flipped from purple to white every time the schedule was switched from VR-3 to FT-10. In another phase, the schedule still changed periodically, but the card always remained on the purple side. Results showed that the participants' responding was controlled by the schedule of reinforcement, by the color of the card, or both. These results suggest that changes in patterns of reinforcement lead to changes in stimulus control. In addition, the stimulus control for a behavior can come from several different sources. During teaching, it may facilitate the development of stimulus control to change the environment when a new behavior is required.
Date: August 2020
Creator: Abdel-Jalil, Awab
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library

Exploring the Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Resilience, School Engagement and Success in Adolescents with Co-Occurring Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder

There remains a dearth of literature that explains with no ambiguity, the complex relationships that exist between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and resilience, as well as school engagement and school in individuals with a co-occurring diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD). This study seeks to fill this missing gap in the literature. These research questions were answered using a retrospective cross-sectional study design of national secondary data from the National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH). The findings revealed that the more ACEs an individual had, the less they were likely to engage and succeed in school. A similar finding was obtained for resilience as individuals with more ACEs showed less resilience. However, counterintuitively to the hypothesis of the project, having both ASD and ADHD does not necessarily make these outcomes worse compared to having a singular diagnosis of either ASD or ADHD. The significance of this study is that it informs rehabilitation counselors as well as educators on the need for early identification of individuals with ASD and ADHD with a background of ACEs and commence interventions early enough to ensure they are more resilient and obtain improved success in school-related activities as well …
Date: August 2021
Creator: Adaralegbe, Ngozi Jane Frances
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library

Queering Afrofuturism: Freedom Dreaming and Co-Constructing Black Queer Spaces in Teacher Preparation Programs

Using queer and Afrofuturist frameworks, this Black feminist qualitative study explored queer Black pre-and in-service teachers' cultural and intersectional practices as they navigated traditional heteronormative educational spaces. This research study relied on counternarratives and storytelling and drew from Afrofuturism to understand the use of their lived experiences to counter monolithic queer narratives. The queer Black teachers in this study examined and negotiated how their Blackness and queerness showed up in teacher preparation programs (TPP) and K-12 classrooms. Moreover, they eventually refused to hide or censure their authentic selves. An analysis of the narratives and counternarratives showed that queer Black teachers drew from ancestral traditions to create queer Afrofuturist spaces in TPPs and educational places. Furthermore, due to their queer Black intersectional approaches, their classrooms, assignments, curriculum, and pedagogy disrupted normative teaching practices. Implications, recommendations, and future research are discussed.
Date: July 2023
Creator: Adeniji, Danelle Althea
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library
Framing of COVID-19 in Newspapers: A Perspective from the US-Mexico Border (open access)

Framing of COVID-19 in Newspapers: A Perspective from the US-Mexico Border

Article discusses the degree to which the media report a health emergency and how it affects the seriousness with which the people respond to combat the health crisis. After collecting relevant news articles, we used sentiment analysis, rapid automatic keyword extraction (RAKE), and co-occurrence network analysis to examine the main themes and sentiments of COVID-19 news articles.
Date: November 24, 2022
Creator: Afrin, Rifat; Harun, Ahasan; Prybutok, Gayle & Prybutok, Victor R.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library

The Effect of Online Consumer Reviews and Brand Equity on the Consumer Decision Making Process

This research aims to investigate the (1) review effects on consumer decision making process, (2) effects of negative reviews on brand equity, and (3) consumers' likely response to a brand's request for reviews. The objective of the first essay is to investigate the nature of the relationship between skepticism and consumer decision making in an online behavior context. Its second objective is to know whether people's belief on their abilities or their hedonic principle moderates the relationship between a person's skepticism toward online reviews and their reliance on online reviews. The objective of the second essay is to explore whether negative online reviews that focus on service quality specific dimensions have a different effect on a service organization's perceived brand equity. Its second objective is to analyze the role of emotional contagion in the relationship between negative reviews related to various service quality dimensions and its effect on perceived brand equity. The main objective of the third essay is to know whether consumers are more likely to write an online review for a brand when the request comes from a higher equity brand. This essay also investigates how message trust and persuasion knowledge influence the relationship between a brand's request …
Date: December 2021
Creator: Ahmad, Fayez
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library

Resurrection Attempts: Essays

This dissertation is composed of a critical preface, "Reconciling Art and Account in the Creative Essay," and the essay collection Resurrection Attempts: Essays. The preface situates the following essay collection within the genre of contemporary creative nonfiction. Specifically, it argues that genre-bending or genre hybridity are inherent and unavoidable features of creative nonfiction writing and should be celebrated, rather than denied or lamented. It points to other writers who deliberately challenge the bounds of genre, and discusses some of the collection's innovations in form and other ways it offers experimentation, such as use of unusual or borrowed points of view, disruption of chronology, and adoption of elements from other genres of writing, including fiction, poetry, and academic. Ultimately, embracing the artistic side of creative nonfiction (as opposed to its "purely" journalistic side) allows for heightened intimacy with the reader, a much wider breadth of storytelling, and a more vulnerable—and therefore more truthful—interrogation of legacy and the human experience. Resurrection Attempts is a collection of essays exploring the writer's rural Texas childhood and the early and tragic losses of her parents, including the effect of those experiences on her adult life and performance of motherhood. The voices of the writer's sisters …
Date: May 2020
Creator: Al-Qasem, Ruby
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library

Use of Videoconference Technology in the Social Engagement of Older Adults by Aging-in-Place Organizations

This dissertation investigates videoconference technology adoption by aging-in-place organizations to facilitate the social engagement of older adults. It comprises three studies that examine the initiation and coordination of technology adoption by aging-in-place organizations and addresses the factors associated with successful adoption of relational videoconference technology by older adults. The first study is a systematic literature review exploring the role of aging-in-place organizations in social engagement of older adults through videoconference technology. The second study is a survey of adult relatives and friends of older adults regarding videoconference technology adoption by older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic and their experience with facilitating resources. It applies technology adoption theory and a structural equation model to characterize the role of aging-in-place organizations. The third study is a pilot test of a new online platform called Circular that is designed to support social engagement of older adults. Through these studies, this research extends the existing body of knowledge regarding modes to facilitate adoption of relational technology by older adults and to empower senior centers and other aging-in-place organizations as they seek to socially engage the aging members of their communities.
Date: December 2023
Creator: Alagood, John
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library

Investigation of Existing and New Human Resource Practices on Public Health Employee Retention during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Saudi Arabia

This research investigates existing and new HR practices that have impacted public health employee retention in Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 pandemic. It builds on social support theory and social exchange theory to better understand the relationships between HR practices and retention, and uses quantitative methods to examine the hypotheses based on a conceptual framework. While OLS regression is employed to analyze the relationships between HR practices and retention, path analysis (bootstrapping) is used to examine the mediator variable. Based on 417 valid questionnaires distributed to public health employees in Saudi Arabia's central, western, and eastern regions, the analysis illustrates that while training and emphasis on work-life-balance as existing HR practices had a positive effect on retention, social support (supervisory support) and promotion of mental well-being as new HR practices also had a positive effect on retention during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the hypothesis that compensation and occupational health and safety would improve retention was not supported. These results indicate that financial benefits and providing safety materials did not lead to employee retention. Meanwhile, safety training programs, psychosocial support, and promotion of well-being have been essential HR practices during the pandemic. Regarding the mediation hypotheses, interestingly, the results show that …
Date: July 2023
Creator: Alattas, Mohsen Mohammad A
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library
Metal, Pedagogy, Women, Kuwait: An Autoethnographic Feminist Approach to Questioning Systems of Education (open access)

Metal, Pedagogy, Women, Kuwait: An Autoethnographic Feminist Approach to Questioning Systems of Education

This research seeks to explore how the metal arts are taught to women in Kuwait in an undergraduate setting, making the call for the use of feminist pedagogy when teaching the metal arts to women in Kuwait. This research is achieved using the qualitative methodology of analytic autoethnography. The theoretical framework is a feminist lens bridging the social construction of gender with the gendering of objects and feminist standpoint theory. The data comes from the experiences of creating three of my own pieces of artwork as well as the pieces themselves in tandem with historical, political, and cultural contexts. The analysis from this research is then bridged with feminist pedagogy in order to begin to develop an inclusive metal arts curriculum for women in Kuwait.
Date: May 2021
Creator: Alayar, Moneerah
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library

Saudi Mothers' Experiences Maintaining Their Young Children's Arabic Language and Islamic-Saudi Identity

As more Saudi individuals temporarily settle in the United States to pursue higher education, it becomes increasingly important to understand the impact this experience has on their families. The purpose of this qualitative instrumental case study was to examine Saudi mothers' experiences and motivations after transitioning to life in the United States. The main research question was: What are Saudi mothers' experiences of supporting their children maintaining and developing Arabic language skills and Islamic-Saudi identities while they are learning English and Western culture in U.S. schools? The sub-questions of the study were: Why do Saudi mothers in this study want their children to learn the Arabic language and culture? What are their concerns? What are the challenges Saudi mothers face in socializing their children to develop their Islamic-Saudi identity? What practices do mothers use to help their children preserve their Arabic language and develop the Islamic Saudi-identity while growing up in the United States? This study was conceptually framed within the theories of parenting style and acculturation. Participants in the study were five Saudi mothers pursuing higher education in Texas. Data were collected through three semi-structured interviews and four audio journals with each participant, and a focus group with the …
Date: May 2021
Creator: Albakr, Ashwaq Mohammed
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library

Some People Let You Down

Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community
The nine stories in Mike Alberti’s debut collection shine a sharp light on small-town American life —not the Arcadian small towns of yesteryear, but the old mill towns hanging on after the mill has stopped running, the deserted agricultural communities in the middle of vast industrial farms, places where bad luck has become part of the weather. But even in these blighted, neglected landscapes, the possibility of renewal always presents itself: there is hope for these places and the characters who inhabit them. In these fresh, innovative stories, some people let you down, but some people don’t.
Date: November 15, 2020
Creator: Alberti, Mike, 1987-
Object Type: Book
System: The UNT Digital Library

Tall Walls and High Fences: Officers and Offenders, the Texas Prison Story

Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community
Texas has one of the world’s largest prison systems, in operation for more than 170 years and currently employing more than 28,000 people. Hundreds of thousands of people have been involved in the prison business in Texas: inmates, correctional officers, public officials, private industry representatives, and volunteers have all entered the secure facilities and experienced a different world. Previous books on Texas prisons have focused either on records and data of the prisons, personal memoirs by both inmates and correctional officers, or accounts of prison breaks. Tall Walls and High Fences is the first comprehensive history of Texas prisons, written by a former law enforcement officer and an officer of the Texas prisons. Bob Alexander and Richard K. Alford chronicle the significant events and transformation of the Texas prison system from its earliest times to the present day, paying special attention to the human side of the story. Incarceration policy evolved from isolation to hard labor to rodeo and educational opportunities, with reform measures becoming an ever-evolving quest. The complex job of the correctional officer has evolved as well—they must ensure custody and control over the inmate population at all times, in order to provide a proper environment conducive to …
Date: October 15, 2020
Creator: Alexander, Bob & Alford, Richard K.
Object Type: Book
System: The UNT Digital Library

Rare Integrity: A Portrait of L. W. Payne, Jr.

Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community
Leonidas Warren Payne, Jr. (1873-1945), counted Robert Frost among his friends and a member of the inner circle of poets who embraced him and sought his advice. He altered forever the perception of Texas when he created the Texas Folklore Society that continues to record, publish, and promote Texas history, myth, music, and customs. He guided J. Frank Dobie back into The University of Texas fold, where Dobie produced his finest work and established a voice for Texas literature. L. W. Payne, Jr., influenced generations of American school children through his anthologies that became basic English textbooks. Drawing upon Payne’s own writing, interviews with former colleagues and students, and private letters lain undisclosed since Payne’s death, Rare Integrity reveals a portrait of a man whose great gift of creative generosity and warmth of heart enabled him to see a person as the person wished to be seen.
Date: November 2021
Creator: Alexander, Hansen
Object Type: Book
System: The UNT Digital Library

The Emergence of Arab Nation-State Nationalism as an Alternative to the Supranational Concept of Ummah

In this dissertation, I examine the political shift or reorientation of Arabs and Muslims from the supranational Ummah to the Western form of nation-state by attending to modern Arabic novel in the period between World War I and World War II. I explore the emergence of secularism in Arab national formation. One of my central arguments is that Arab nationalism is indeed a misleading phrase as it gives the impression of unity and coherence to a complex phenomenon that materialize in a number of trends as a form of struggle. In the first chapter, I defined the scope of my argument and the underlying structure and function of nationalism as a form of representation masked by nationalist ideologies. To investigate the reorientation of Arabs and Muslims from Ummah to adopting nation-state, I utilize Spivak's criticism of the system of representation along with Foucault's theorization of discourse. I argued along Edward Said that although the Western national discourse might have influenced the Arab nationalists, I do not believe they prevented them from consciously appropriating nationalism in a free creative way. I also explained that the Arab adoption of a secularist separatist nationalism was more an outcome than an effect in the …
Date: December 2023
Creator: Alhamili, Mohammed Ali M.
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Status of the Organization of Knowledge in Cultural Heritage Institutions in Arabian Gulf Countries (open access)

The Status of the Organization of Knowledge in Cultural Heritage Institutions in Arabian Gulf Countries

No published studies to date examined the practices in creation or adoption of metadata in cultural heritage institutions or evaluated metadata in bibliographic databases in the Arabian Gulf counties and assessed its potential interoperability in the aggregation that would provide a central point of access to bibliographic databases of cultural heritage institutions. This exploratory study aimed to address this gap with the goal of: (1) developing understanding of the current state of information representation and knowledge organization in cultural heritage collections in Arabian Gulf countries, and (2) exploring perspectives for future developments such as creating regional large-scale portals similar to Digital Public Library of America, Europeana etc. that facilitate discovery by aggregating metadata and possible barriers to these developments.. The study is focused on a Kuwaiti, Qatari, and Omani libraries, museums, and archives. The mixed-methods research combined semi-structured interviews of the bibliographic database managers at 15 cultural heritage institutions and in-depth content analysis of a sample of 412 metadata records that represent items in these bibliographic databases for accuracy, completeness, consistency, use of knowledge organization systems, etc. This study findings make a research contribution important for evaluating the feasibility and planning of future aggregations of cultural heritage bibliographic databases. Results …
Date: August 2021
Creator: Aljalahmah, Saleh H
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library

Toward Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Support the Identification of Accessibility Challenges

The goal of this thesis is to support the automated identification of accessibility in user reviews or bug reports, to help technology professionals prioritize their handling, and, thus, to create more inclusive apps. Particularly, we propose a model that takes as input accessibility user reviews or bug reports and learns their keyword-based features to make a classification decision, for a given review, on whether it is about accessibility or not. Our empirically driven study follows a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. We introduced models that can accurately identify accessibility reviews and bug reports and automate detecting them. Our models can automatically classify app reviews and bug reports as accessibility-related or not so developers can easily detect accessibility issues with their products and improve them to more accessible and inclusive apps utilizing the users' input. Our goal is to create a sustainable change by including a model in the developer's software maintenance pipeline and raising awareness of existing errors that hinder the accessibility of mobile apps, which is a pressing need. In light of our findings from the Blackboard case study, Blackboard and the course material are not easily accessible to deaf students and hard of hearing. Thus, deaf students …
Date: May 2023
Creator: Aljedaani, Wajdi Mohammed R M., Sr.
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library
Electronic Health Record Systems and Cyber Hygiene: Awareness, Knowledge, and Practices among Physicians in Kuwait (open access)

Electronic Health Record Systems and Cyber Hygiene: Awareness, Knowledge, and Practices among Physicians in Kuwait

This study explored issues related to the adoption and implementation of electronic health record (EHR) systems including building the awareness, knowledge, and experience of physicians toward cyber hygiene. This study used a qualitative research method to assess (a) the barriers to EHR systems adoption and implementation in Kuwait and (b) the level of awareness, knowledge and experiences related to cyber hygiene practices in Kuwait. The findings of the study supported the conceptual framework used to guide the research of the factors impacting the adoption and implementation of EHR systems in Kuwait as well as explore the level of awareness, knowledge, and experience of physicians about both EHR systems and cyber hygiene. The results from the systematic literature review analysis identified seven major barriers. These are financial barriers, time, difficulty of using technology, lack of support, negative attitude, legal and ethical (policies), and cultural barriers. The findings from the semistructured interviews supported the literature findings and provided more in-depth insights into the structural and social issues affecting the adoption and implementation of EHR systems. Given that Kuwait is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC), the results from the literature analysis showed that the problems in Kuwait are similar to …
Date: December 2022
Creator: Alkhaledi, Reem
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library

My Darling Boys: A Family at War, 1941-1947

Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community
My Darling Boys is the story of a New Mexico farm family whose three sons were sent to fight in World War II. All flew combat aircraft in the Army Air Forces. In 1973 one of the boys, Oscar Allison, a B-24 top turret gunner and flight engineer, wrote a memoir of his World War II experiences. On a mission to Regensburg, Germany, his bomber, ravaged by German fighters, was shot down. He was captured and spent fifteen months in German stalag prisons. His memoir, the core of this unique book, details his training, combat, and prisoner-of-war experience in a truthful, introspective, and compelling manner. Fred H. Allison, the author and Oscar’s nephew, gained access to family letters that supplement Oscar’s story and bring to light the experiences of Oscar’s brothers. Harold Allison, the author’s father, was sidelined from combat as a bomber copilot due to a health condition. The letters also tell of the brother who did not come home, Wiley Grizzle Jr., a P-51 fighter pilot. Wiley’s last mission brought his squadron of Mustangs into a pitched battle with German fighters bound for the front to attack American troops. The letters also introduce the boys’ family, who fought …
Date: October 2023
Creator: Allison, Fred H.
Object Type: Book
System: The UNT Digital Library

Quantifying the Effects of Single Nucleotide Changes in the TATA Box of the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus 35S Promoter on Gene Expression in Arabidopsis thaliana

Synthetic biology is a rapidly growing field that aims to treat cellular biological networks in an analogous way to electrical circuits. However, the field of plant synthetic biology has not grown at the same pace as bacterial and yeast synthetic biology, leaving a dearth of characterized tools for the community. Due to the need for tools for the synthetic plant biologist, I have endeavored to create a library of well-characterized TATA box variants in the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) 35S promoter using the standardized assembly method Golden Braid 2.0. I introduced single nucleotide changes in the TATA box of the CaMV 35S promoter, a genetic part widely used in plant gene expression studies and agricultural biotechnology. Using a dual-luciferase reporter system, I quantified the transcriptional strength of the altered TATA box sequences and compared to the wild-type sequence, both in transient protoplast assays and stable transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana plants. The library of TATA-box modified CaMV 35S promoters with varying transcriptional strengths created here can provide the plant synthetic biology community with a series of modular Golden Braid-adapted genetic parts that can be used dependably and reproducibly by researchers to fine-tune gene expression levels in complex, yet predictable, synthetic genetic circuits.
Date: December 2021
Creator: Amack, Stephanie Carolina
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library

Information Privacy and Security Associated with Healthcare Technology Use

This dissertation consists of three studies that investigate the information privacy & security associated with healthcare technology use. Essay 1 PRISMA-style systematically reviews the existing literature on privacy information disclosure in IoT technology and serves as the theoretical foundation of the current research. It is crucial to comprehend why, how, and under what consequences individuals choose to disclose their personal and health information since doing so is beneficial to the company. This SLR method allows us to find those factors that significantly impact individuals' behavioral intention to disclose personal information while using IoT technologies. Essay 2 posits, develops, and tests a comprehensive theoretical framework built upon the theory of planned behavior and the health belief model to examine factors affecting willingness to disclose PHI in order to use WFDs. A research survey is designed and distributed to a crowdsourcing platform, Mechanical Turk (M-Turk). Research hypotheses are tested using partial least square – structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). To achieve this purpose, Essay 3 extends the findings from the previous essay and further investigates the caregiver context. Therefore, we developed a novel theoretical model utilizing privacy calculus theory and the technology acceptance model to investigate the willingness of the elderly to disclose …
Date: July 2023
Creator: Amin, M A Shariful
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library
Leaving the Community: A Qualitative Study of Hijra Individuals in Bangladesh (open access)

Leaving the Community: A Qualitative Study of Hijra Individuals in Bangladesh

The hijra community individuals are one of the most neglected and underprivileged sexual minority groups in Bangladesh. Historically this community has been excluded from mainstream society and was compelled to live and work in separate communal spaces. However, new policies of inclusion implemented by government and non-government organizations have resulted in many hijra individuals leaving their communities. In this research, I focused on how the hijra individuals of Bangladesh come out of their hijra communities to find work and accommodation in mainstream society. Based on 11 in-depth ethnographic field interviews and qualitative data analysis, I found that after leaving the community, the hijra individuals living in Dhaka enter a gendered borderland where they occupy a unique outsider-within position. They undertake different survival strategies to survive amongst harsh socio-economic conditions intersected by multiple modes of discrimination such as maintaining a new guru (leader) for social protection, developing support networks, and redefining their gender identity as ‘transgender,' provide the tools to survive life outside their community. Through these findings, I reflect on the ways poor sexual minority groups such as the hijra survive and use their limited resources to find access to housing and informal work. These findings will add to the …
Date: December 2022
Creator: Anandita, Prapti
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library
A Quantitative Approach to the History of Music Binder's Volumes (1820–1900) (open access)

A Quantitative Approach to the History of Music Binder's Volumes (1820–1900)

Music binder's volumes, or collections of sheet music typically bound by women in the nineteenth century, constitute an informative and underutilized set of historical artifacts. Each binder's volume can be viewed as a Spotify playlist frozen in time. An individual volume contains more than just the volume's individual pieces; it also holds the marginalia, the choices women made on what to include in a binder, and information on where and how music was produced. This dissertation examines music binder's volumes quantitatively, processing information found in binder's volumes by using the MARC and other cataloguing data to construct a relational database. I engage with broad questions of music publishing and consumption and provide a method to contextualize qualitative results on a larger scale. In doing so, I make two distinct contributions to music research and the digital humanities. First, this project offers a clear path for engaging with music binder's volumes and material history of nineteenth-century America in ways that scholars have rarely engaged in prior to this point. I highlight how data analysis provides new framings for binder's volumes and for sheet music consumption both at the song-level and at larger levels of the data. Second, and more broadly, this …
Date: December 2022
Creator: Anderson, Brian K
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library

Behind the Curtain of Public Space: Revealing the Narratives of Corporate Street Hawking in Globalizing Accra

All street hawkers are not the same in many Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) of the global south as often portrayed by the media and documented in extant literature. This perception has created a gap in knowledge as researchers explore street hawking activities in NICs. In this study, I investigated a new informality trend of street hawking is coming into being within the capital city of Accra, Ghana. As governance is increasingly becoming entrepreneurial, informal activities are gradually becoming formal. Formal and registered businesses are increasingly capitalizing on hawking activities to occupy public spaces. The advent of the informality trend, I term corporate street hawking opens up new issues for the political economy, labor, and urban studies. By employing semi-structured interviews with 47 street hawkers in Accra, this paper sought to investigate three broadly interrelated questions. First, how do neoliberal policies impact the production of public space in Accra? Second, is corporate street hawking a form of creative destruction? Finally, how do corporate street hawkers practice agency within Accra?
Date: December 2021
Creator: Ansah, Hilary Ama
Object Type: Thesis or Dissertation
System: The UNT Digital Library