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- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Description
Contemporary cities are physical and virtual. This thesis describes the findings of a mixed-methods study concerning visual images of the city in the urban Northeast of the United States. I ground these approaches in existing literature concerning digital media, visual narrative, genre ecology, urban planning, and virtual places. The first part of the study analyzes the results of a survey in which 150 people responded to questions about social media use and the relationships between image type and the functions of social media in urban contexts. The second part of the study analyzes the results of coding one year of visual images tweeted by @CambMA, the municipal Twitter feed for the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. These approaches required the development of new tools for analyzing visual communication and genre moves in specific media contexts. My research suggests that specific image types are suited for specific media functions in the context of visual communication in virtual urban environments and that some image types are especially effective in capturing and expressing the city. These findings provide potential strategies for municipal social media channels to consider in terms of how they communicate with their audiences.
ContributorsDel Nero, Zachary (Author) / Maid, Barry (Thesis advisor) / D'Angelo, Barbara (Committee member) / Mara, Andrew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
With 285-million blind and visually impaired worldwide, and 25.5 million in the United States, federally funded universities should be at the forefront when designing accessible websites for the blind community. Fifty percent of the university homepages discussed in my thesis failed accessibility checker tests because alternative text was not provided in the alt-attribute for numerous images, making them inaccessible to blind users. The images which failed included logos, photographs of people, and images with text. Understanding image content and context in relation to the webpage is important for writing alternative text that is useful, yet writers interpret and define the content and context of images differently or not at all. Not all universities follow legal guidelines of using alternative text for online images nor implements best practices of analyzing images prior to describing them within the context of the webpage. When an image used in a webpage is designed only to be seen by sighted users and not to be seen by screen reader software, then that image is not comparably accessible to a blind user, as Section 508 mandates.
ContributorsSabbia, Michael Robert (Author) / Maid, Barry (Thesis advisor) / Brumberger, Eva (Thesis advisor) / Mara, Andrew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Since 1939, Batman has been a staple character of the comic book industry. He has been used throughout the last 80 years as a conduit through which to portray mental health content. This thesis analyzes how mental health content has changed in Batman comic books from 1939 to today. Based on existing research, I identified that mental health content has been present in Batman comic books for as long as they have existed. According to my research results, content can be traced back to the Golden Age of comic books (1939-1956), with a decrease in content in the Silver Age of comic books (1956-1970) due to the emergence of the Comics Code Authority. In the Bronze Age of comic books (1970-1986), mental health content reached its peak. In the Modern Age of comic books (1986-Present), content once again dropped, but not as low as in the Golden and Silver Ages. Identifying how mental health representation has changed since 1939 can help researchers to better understand how comic books can be used to communicate with readers.
ContributorsDagenais, Jordan (Author) / D'Angelo, Barbara (Thesis advisor) / Maid, Barry (Committee member) / Mara, Andrew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Contracting is an integral component of both government (i.e., public) and private business. As part of the contracting process, contracting companies must submit proposals to federal agencies or private businesses; individuals who write proposals on behalf of contracting companies are known as proposal writers. Although proposal writers are central to the proposal writing process, they are only marginally represented in available literature on the contracting and proposal writing processes. Additionally, available literature is disproportionately influenced by industry and trade sources, versus academic sources, and completed by industry authorities. As a result, key findings from such reports may not reflect the feedback gathered as part of this research. This research utilized a 25-question survey with both multiple choice and free answer questions to gauge the most and least effective components of the proposal writing process. Communication and collaboration—internally within the proposal team or within the company, and externally between the company and customers, clients, etc.— were cited as both the most and least effective components of the process. Notably, however, communication and collaboration were not the most frequently encountered issues, as only 23.5% of proposal writers reported communication as a common issues. Instead, supporting resources (46.9%), time/ schedule (49.2%), and direction. instructions (44.9%) were reported as the most common issues that proposal writers encountered, although one in four participants noted that issues were not consistent across proposals.
ContributorsRast, Mickella (Author) / Mara, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Stambler, Mollie (Committee member) / Madson, Michael (Committee member) / Lambrecht, Kathryn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This paper documents a study of the relationship between heads up display (HUDs) customization and player performance. Additional measures capture satisfaction and prior gaming experience. The goal of this study was to develop a framework on which future Human Systems Engineering studies could create games that are tailor made to examine a given area of interest. This study utilized a two-by-two design, where participants play a two-dimensional (2D) platformer game with a mechanic that incentivizes attention to the HUD. This study successfully developed a framework and was moderately successful in uncovering limitations and demonstrating areas for improvement in follow-on studies. Specifically, this study illuminated issues with the low amount of usable data caused by design issues, participant apathy, and reliance on self-reporting data collection. Extensions of this study can utilize this framework and should look to recruit beyond crowdsourcing platforms, collect more diverse data, reduce participant effort, and address other considerations that were found during execution.
ContributorsWallace, Xavier Guillermo (Author) / Roscoe, Rod (Thesis advisor) / Mara, Andrew (Committee member) / Cooke, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The Covid-19 global pandemic saw many college and university faculty scrambling to quickly transition their on-site courses online owing to various city, state, and national lockdowns and social distancing efforts in order to stem the spread of the disease. Nearly 90 percent of institutions had to resort to some sort of online or remote learning in order to accommodate continued student learning amongst the lockdowns and required social distancing that was implemented. Similar methods were implemented for the following summer and fall semesters of 2020, bleeding into the spring 2021 semester. These restrictions meant that faculty could not teach their courses wholly, or in some circumstances at all, in an on-site delivery method. Instead, many higher education faculty members had to make the shift to teaching their courses completely online, or in a mixed method of delivery, on-site and online. The purpose of this study was to determine if learner-centered teaching was a key component of the quick transition of on-site to remote teaching in the Spring and Fall 2020 semesters and how this information may provide insight for future online course development.
ContributorsDuVal, Christopher (Author) / Abe Harris, La Verne (Thesis advisor) / D'Angelo, Barbara (Committee member) / Mara, Andrew (Committee member) / Ilyasova, Alex (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Educational videos are a large part of the YouTube community, and an emerging niche of these videos is educational videos created by professionals in the field. Creating content on their profession establishes them as experts and trustworthy sources of information that audiences can turn to while researching topics relating to the field. This study includes eighteen videos from three doctors creating medical-educational content posted to YouTube. The purpose of this study was to determine if these content creators use best practices for educational videos and the common themes these videos share. The best practices were gathered from previous research conducted on educational videos. These practices are viewability, timing, accessibility, reliability, and confidence. Commonalities noted across channels were then coded to find common themes within the niche. These themes do not need to be in every video, but they should be present on two channels. These themes include formatting videos and thumbnails, styles of videos, and their use of humor and entertaining additional content. These videos also break down the negative perceptions of authority that are often attached to doctors by humanizing the doctors to the audience. Combining these best practices and the use of the found common themes strengthen the videos to create engaging and educational content.
ContributorsTaylor, Darby Lyn (Author) / Mara, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Carradini, Stephen (Committee member) / Madson, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022