Rites and Rituals of the Yaxhilan Queens: Analysis of the Iconography of the Yaxchilan Lintels 24, 25, and 26

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Bentley, Jillian Rites and Rituals of the Yaxchilan Queens: Analysis of the Iconography of the Yaxchilan Lintels 24, 25, and 26 Faculty Mentor: Allen Christianson, Comparative Arts and Letters The ruins of Yaxchilan on the shores of the Usumacinta River, Mexico have some of the only occurrences of iconography that contain women performing sacred bloodletting […]

Unveiling Poetic Patterns in El Titulo de Totonicapan

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DeVictoria, Karen Unveiling Poetic Patterns in El Título de Totonicapán Faculty Mentor: Allen Christenson, Comparative Arts and Letters When the Spanish launched a conquest on the Maya empire in the 16th century, the Maya suffered devastating blows to their livelihood and culture. Perhaps the most injurious effect of this conquest was the loss of the […]

Will we let a language die?

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Heath, Joseph Will We Let a Language Die? Analyzing Efforts by the European Union to Protect Minority Languages Joseph Heath josephaheath@ gmail.com jheath92 William Eggington, Department of Linguistics and English Language Introduction My project examined efforts to maintain the Rusyn language (also known as Ruthenian ). Rusyn is spoken by 50,000 people living primarily in […]

Domain Adaptation in Machine Translation

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Mathias, Joshua Domain Adaptation in Machine Translation Faculty Mentor: Deryle Lonsdale, Linguistics Department Abstract This study uses an open source statistical machine translation system (Moses) to perform machine translation for specific domains, or text types. A machine translation system can be adapted to a specific domain by using training data from the same domain. In […]

Teaching Teachers to Teach by Teaching Readers to Read

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Dawan Coombs, English Education Evaluation of Academic Objectives Struggling readers fill today’s secondary classrooms in alarming numbers. Although numerous programs remediate these readers, research shows students need more than strategy instruction to read successfully. Reading difficulties result from a complex combination of social, cognitive, and affective factors that can only be addressed through meaningful instruction […]

Visualizing Intermedial Fairy Tales: Television, Film, Other Audiovisual Media

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Jill Terry Rudy, English, and Jarom McDonald, Digital Humanities Evaluation of Academic Objectives This project has leveraged data processing and visualization methods that are becoming significant paradigms in digital humanities scholarship; specifically, we have repositioned the existing teleography of fairy tales on television from Channeling Wonder into a data corpus that can be mined and […]

My Father’s Name: A Study of Patronymic Naming in Mozambique

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Preston Christensen and Cynthia Hallen, Linguistics Abstract Patronymic naming is very common in parts of Mozambique but there has possibly been no formal documentation of this practice prior to this study. Patronymic naming involves the passing of the father’s name to the children and is not to be confused with patronymic surnames. The research was […]