The Sophie Mentored Research Project: Red Vienna Sourcebook and The Critically Annotated Collected Works of Elisa von der Recke

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Rob McFarland and Michelle S. James Acknowledgements: Without funding there would be no Sophie project, which is why the first item in this report on the Sophie activities during 2017 must be an expression of our gratitude to both the ORCA office and to the College of Humanities, on behalf of the faculty members involved, […]

Improving High School Students’ Workforce Literacy through Collaborative, Online Alternative Reality Games

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Jon Balzotti, Assistant Professor of English Evaluation of Academic Objectives This project analyzed student engagement in a high school setting using digital learning environments based on a semi-realistic workplace simulation. The research team explored the challenges of high school student engagement in both traditional and digital learning environments. Data from student surveys suggest that traditional role-play […]

Acoustic Phonetic Analysis of Tol

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Micah Wood, Dr. Chris Rogers, Linguistics Tol is one of the languages belonging to the language family referred to as Jicaquean in the linguistic literature. It has roughly 200 speakers remaining in a single community in northern Honduras, called Montaña de la Flor. Some relatively recent grammatical descriptions of the language provide useful but incomplete information […]

Women of the Grand Tour: Travel, Space, and Representation of Women in Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour Portraiture

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Anne Totten and Dr. Martha Peacock, Comparative Arts & Letters Introduction The Grand Tour was a quintessential part of eighteenth-century English culture. A trip that lasted from six months to three years, the purpose of this journey was for young men to supplement their education with exposure to the art and architecture of the Italian […]

Slam Poetry in Suburban Schools

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Madelyn Taylor and Christopher Crowe, English Introduction Since the birth of hip-hop culture as youth culture in the 1970s, exploration of hip-hop influenced pedagogies in formal schooling has grown increasingly popular (Hill, 2009). By centering classrooms on elements of hip-hop arts such as spoken word, graffiti culture, and hip-hop music, educational research has seen notable […]

Open-source Consistency Evaluation for Chinese Word Segmentation

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Blake Smith and Robert Reynolds, Digital Humanities Chinese in its written form, whether typed or penned, does not separate its characters by spaces. Imagine if this were the case with English, and a sign for a job fair were to display “opportunityisnowhere.” Regardless of the intent being to announce that “opportunity is now here,” the […]

Developing and Utilizing the VSFP Database: Atalanta and Girls’ Adventure Fiction

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Isaac Robertson and Leslee Thorne-Murphy, English The original purpose of my project was two-fold: 1) to expand the Victorian Short Fiction Project, a peer-reviewed database compiled from Victorian periodical fiction housed in Brigham Young University’s special collections library; and 2) to utilize this database in order to perform a literary study of nineteenth-century colonial fiction. […]

Perception of Speech and Song in Religious Music: A Neurological Approach

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Dagan Pielstick and Francesca Lawson, Comparative Arts & Letters Introduction The relationship between speech and song has been an area of interest in evolutionary biology and neuroscience over the past two decades. Some evolutionary biologists have hypothesized that music and language descended from a protolanguage in early human communication (Brown 2000). At the same time, […]