Interdisciplinary – Page 21 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Interdisciplinary

To Make the Slave Anew

To Make the Slave Anew: Art, History, and the Politics of Authenticity is a book that aims to discern how our modern understanding of slavery and the life of the slave came to be. It explores the memory of slavery and racism in the United States through the lens of music, visual studies, literature, ethnography and folklore. Each chapter achieves this by studying various figures, events, and pieces of work that impacted the cultural conception of slavery by including pictures of art and excerpts from literature, scholarly work, journals, etc. Through the exploration of various methods of cultural memory, To Make the Slave Anew argues that our contemporary perceptions of slavery are based on more recent””largely late nineteenth and early twentieth century””myths regarding the life of the slave and slavery in the South. With recent questions on the memory and relics of racism and slavery in the United States gaining more attention, To Make the Slave Anew offers a way of understanding how society comes to remember such concepts, and how those memories can shift with time.

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Archaeology of Jebel Barkal Website Creation

Jebel Barkal is a UNESCO World Heritage site in northern Sudan. The Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project at the University of Michigan was looking for an effective way to share its archaeological findings with a range of audiences and found that creating a website would meet these needs. We surveyed different archaeological project websites to determine which features would work well for the project’s needs. This also helped us to determine what website builder would be utilized, as they all have different offerings for features you can include. In addition, we looked into how the websites looked aesthetically to figure out what would appeal most to different audiences, the general public, teachers, students, scholars, and eventually people in Sudan (in an Arabic version). From our previous research we found that the features most important to us were a research portal, one section with older research from the previous director, Tim Kendall, one from the current director, Geoff Emberling, and a news feed/blog to keep visitors up to date with the findings at the site and intrigue possible sponsors to want to donate. We also found that for aesthetic purposes, making sure text passages are not too long and that there are images included helps to keep the user connected to the topic but not overwhelmed. Lastly, formatting of the website was discussed frequently as some audiences have different access to computers and phones; we found that websites generally need a universal format that will look good no matter what device they are displayed on. In conclusion, it will be possible to create an engaging website for this project that will have research available for professionals and researchers to use, but also be useful to the general public with shorter summaries of the research.

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Archaeology of Jebel Barkal (ancient Nubia)

Gebel Barkal is an archaeological site in Northern Sudan along the Nile River that was a capital city and temple center of ancient Kush (Nubia). The site was first excavated in 1916-20 under the direction of George Reisner, an archaeologist based at Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A University of Michigan project is beginning to work at the site with both excavation and conservation, working with the local community to create lasting connections surrounding this site. I have been working to to transcribe George Reisner’s field diaries from 1918 to 1920. By using older information of past seasons (or excavations), my mentor and his colleagues can inform their excavation and gain insight on the best ways to excavate and, in turn, preserve the site.

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The Role of Sociopolitical Factors on Syntactic Alignment

Priming has been widely known as an automatic process, occurring without conscious guidance or intention. This automatic priming mechanism provides a basis for syntactic priming, through which people repeat the syntactic structure that they have just heard. This study investigates the factors that affect syntactic priming, and specifically we focus on how sociopolitical factors affect the degree of priming. Participants were presented with a speaker who read sentences that had core liberal or conservative values. They were then required to describe novel illustrations that could be described using double object or prepositional object sentence structures. Results are still pending on this experiment, but we expect that sociopolitical factors will play a substantive role in increasing or decreasing the priming, depending on how much the participants agreed with the speaker.

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Implications of Grammaticality on Code-Switching in Spanish-English Bilinguals

The Hispanic population is projected to compromise 29 percent of the total US population by 2060 (Colby & Ortman, 2015). Consequently, the Spanish language is finding itself in the spotlight more often than ever before. Understanding how Spanish-English bilinguals communicate can help inform teaching methods for language-learners and curb social taboos that impact Hispanic populations. This study aims to understand the effect of social and grammatical factors on code-switching in Spanish-English bilinguals. Through the use of Qualtrics surveys, bilinguals of varying proficiency levels rated sentences based on how “good” they sounded. They were shown an image and four corresponding sentences: two that were code-switched where one was grammatical and one ungrammatical, and two non-code-switched sentences where one was grammatical and one was ungrammatical. As predicted, ungrammatical sentences were rated more poorly than their grammatical counterparts. While its cost was not as great as that of the grammaticality of the sentence, sentences that contained a code switch were rated more poorly than those that did not. This could be chalked up to the fact that there is a negative connotation associated with code-switching in regions of the US; those that code-switch may face social isolation or pressure against their language use. Understanding this concept through data will allow us as a society to better address this stigma. The data also gives us a more comprehensive understanding of how bilinguals communicate. This can be used when developing more applicable teaching approaches for those that are learning Spanish or English as a second language.

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Studying the Impact of Mentor Feedback on Preservice Teacher Satisfaction

Feedback has been pointed out as a prerequisite for professional growth for experts and novices alike. In the education field, researchers have argued that preservice teachers, or student teachers, need high quality feedback to become exemplary teachers for their future students. One of the goals of the Mentors Matter initiative was to study what constitutes quality feedback during clinical placements from mentor teachers and university supervisors. In our project, we coded 4,010 comments to 394 student teachers for the content and quality that student teachers received as part of their clinical assessments. In our presentation, we will discuss how comments on Teacher Attributes (TA), Connections across Observations (CaO), Data Driven Feedback (DDF), and Actionable Recommendation (AR) relate to student teachers’ satisfaction with their clinical placements. Our results can help establish a guideline for having mentor teachers and university supervisors to provide high quality feedback to student teachers to train and prepare stronger teachers.

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Studying the Impact of Mentor Feedback on Preservice Teacher Satisfaction

Feedback has been pointed out as a prerequisite for professional growth for experts and novices alike. In the education field, researchers have argued that preservice teachers, or student teachers, need high quality feedback to become exemplary teachers for their future students. One of the goals of the Mentors Matter initiative was to study what constitutes quality feedback during clinical placements from mentor teachers and university supervisors. In our project, we coded 4,010 comments to 394 student teachers for the content and quality that student teachers received as part of their clinical assessments. In our presentation, we will discuss how comments on Teacher Attributes (TA), Connections across Observations (CaO), Data Driven Feedback (DDF), and Actionable Recommendation (AR) relate to student teachers’ satisfaction with their clinical placements. Our results can help establish a guideline for having mentor teachers and university supervisors to provide high quality feedback to student teachers to train and prepare stronger teachers.

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War & Military Occupations Data Set

Despite the vast research conducted by social scientists on historical wars, little is known about the success of military occupations. This study analyzes numerous sources to discover whether or not certain wars were military occupations and assess the feasibility of military occupations, specifically in the case of the Afghan-Persian War (1837-1838), Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842), and the Franco-Dahomeyan War (1890-1892). An analysis of these wars highlights that the Afghan-Persian War and the Anglo-Afghan War were not military occupations while the Franco-Dahomeyan War was an unsuccessful military occupation. These findings depict the possibility that military occupations may be less feasible than popularly believed. In using this findings, state governments may realize that military occupations pose more costs than benefits, leading to fewer military occupations in the future.

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Building A Simulated World

Due to the high demand for motor vehicles, one of the key concerns for the automotive industry is to make vehicles accessible and safe. Both real test vehicles and driving simulators are used to assess the quality and performance of vehicles. However, many driving simulators are too expensive to purchase, too complex to use, take too long to run the software, and sometimes lack the desired functional characteristics. The goal of the research is to build a virtual world and an easy-to-use virtual driving simulator platform through the creative use of free software like CARLA and RoadRunner. This driving simulator will be suitable to support research on driver distraction, driver workload, and driver interfaces for partially automated vehicles. This will also inspire qualified people to use the simulation and work on safety on roads.

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Application for Cardiac Signal Visualization and Annotation

Massive amounts of data are being generated at a high velocity in the medical industry, at a rate and dimension that humans cannot catch up understanding them. Machine learning (ML) has the potential to analyze the medical time series data to support physicians in clinical decision making. However, in order to build useful machine learning (ML) algorithms, it is important to have annotated medical data set that can be used to train ML models. This project at the start is about building a viewer for surface ECG and intracardiac electrogram signals acquired during cardiac ablation procedures. Building the framework at early stages to support basic functionality is engineering-oriented with design decisions. We are currently developing a web application in Python. Specifications were created based upon the needed functionality of the application after talking with multiple cardiologists. The next step would be inviting medical students and cardiologists to use the app and gather feedback. Eventually, we want to build a platform/infrastructure that allows for development and evaluation of ML algorithms, and to improve cardiovascular disease management and treatment. By working with cardiologists and intelligent algorithms, we want to build a tool that can quickly review, search, annotate and analyze signals at high throughput. The end goal is that researchers across the country can use our tool to review their own data, and also deploy a real-time graphical decision support tool to assist cardiac procedures.

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