Over the course of time, readers continue to be introduced to various retellings of the fairytale “Cinderella,” in children's literature and young adult fiction. This research looks at three retellings of “Cinderella” to investigate the significant similarities and differences that emerge. Using adaptation theory and structuralist theory, this paper analyzes the significance of selected adaptations relating to human experience and the need for continued reinvention of “Cinderella.” This paper excerpts a longer project analyzing “Cinderella,” by the Brothers Grimm; Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine; Cinder, by Marissa Meyer; and Geekerella, by Ashley Poston. These books are selected for their popularity as gauged by bestsellers lists, ratings from Goodreads, and ratings from Amazon. The analysis draws attention to reused themes, characters (i.e. foils, protagonist, love interest), and settings in retellings as compared to the original story. Retellings of “Cinderella” have been published nearly every year since Ella Enchanted boomed in 1997. With two decades of consistent Cinderella retellings, it is enlightening to reconsider the continued use of this story. It is not surprising that Cinderella's story is recycled. What is interesting to note, however, is the need to retell it in so many different formats and contexts. One possible explanation for all these retellings is that this is a way for publishers to make additional money from similar stories. Nonetheless, “Cinderella” is a classic fairytale, beloved by many, and retellings allow readers, young and old, to relive the story with new and modern twists.

Based on the Newbook Digital Texts: Joseph Mathia Svoboda Diaries, I expect to answer the question of how the route of the Tigris River traveled by Joseph, a man of Eastern European decent living in the Ottoman Empire in the last half of the 19th century, has changed in the last 100 years. The Svoboda Diaries provide an insight into life and travel in the Middle East. They contian the documentation of Joseph's travels in current day Iraq, detailing villages and towns passed on his regular routes. The purpose of this research is to show that some major changes in the river are due to economically and politically motivated policies made to control sections of the river. I hypothesize that economic and social policies since Joseph's time have impacted the river today. In my research, I use mapping software to visualize changes in modern-day Iraq. Through the program StoryMap, I highlight locations along the river and compare it today. Using maps from the late 19th century I will track changes and display them in comparison to an up-to-date map. Newbook currently has a few maps available, although I also plan on using articles from their past interns, one in particular that focuses on Hydraulic Policy in Iraq. Additionally, I will look for other maps available from the Library of Congress. Through my research, I expect to find changes in major dam projects, canals and irrigation projects as well as groups of people and tribes dislocated by changes to the river.

Coreference resolution, the process of identifying expressions that refer to the same entity in discourse, is an important task in natural language processing.  Abstract anaphora are distinct from other types of referring expressions because their antecedents are abstract entities, which can surface in non-nominal form. Abstract pronominal anaphora pose an interesting challenge for anaphora resolution due to the variation in the form and semantics of possible antecedents, which are associated with a small set of pronouns. The goals of this study are to investigate the distribution of abstract pronominal anaphora by analyzing language in use and to examine the role of abstract pronominal anaphora in resolution systems. I will investigate the distribution of the referential pronouns ‘it’, ‘this’ and ‘that’ by annotating and analyzing a corpus of five English registers: newspaper text, academic writing, fiction, spontaneous dialog and planned speech. I will construct these five subcorpora to include a sufficient amount of text for analysis. I will analyze the role of referring pronouns, anaphoric distance, and the structure and semantic category of abstract antecedents. I will compare the distribution of these features within each register and the corpus as a whole.

Following the 2008 financial collapse conversations about understanding personal finance have expanded in the United States. Although government, educators and economists have varying interpretations of the term “financial literacy,” it is generally agreed upon that people need more financial knowledge. Under the assumption that early conversations are useful tools for families to learn about money together, I developed the following hypothesis in my study: engagement with hands-on activities and reading will encourage children and their guardians to talk with each other about money more frequently. The study lent itself best to participatory action research and was developed in partnership with Compass Housing Alliance, an organization which provides housing for formerly homeless families. First, children’s books were identified that incorporated the topic of money and centered the experiences of children from ethnically and economically diverse backgrounds. Students from the UW iSchool’s Master of Library and Information Science were invited to utilize these books for a one-day Read-a-Rama event titled “Let’s Talk About Money.” Founded by UW iSchool Professor Dr. Martin, Read-a-Rama is an immersive literacy program, featuring hands-on activities, group, and individual reading time for children ages 4-11. Before and after the event, parents and guardians of participants were invited to indicate the frequency with which they spoke to their children about money. Through anonymous survey questions and observation notes, the engagement of children with the topic and the potential impacts of the program were explored through anonymous survey questions and observation notes. Following Read-a-Rama, I expected some parents to indicate that they would talk with their children more frequently about money. Observation notes and survey outcomes might aid librarians, educators, and other stakeholders who aim to engage families on the topic of money in alignment with children’s literacy development.

This project considers how we might address barriers to coalition building across difference using interdisciplinary knowledge from social psychology, neuroscience, human centered design, and critical race theory. The first question this project asks is: how might we translate strategies from social psychology that are known to increase the self-other overlap into engaging, immersive virtual experiences (IVE) for coalition building? The concept of the self-other overlap relates to coalition building because of the breadth of research indicating empathy as a self-centric process wherein people are much more likely to feel empathy for people they see as like themselves. This project focuses on IVEs because of their unique ability to create interactive, low stakes environments in which participants can embody experiences outside of their own and play with abstract ideas, such as the social constructs of race, sex, and gender. Given these qualities, the project seeks to specifically explore how IVEs might facilitate compassion, and thus coalition building across identity differences, such as race, gender, and nationality. This project differentiates compassion as empathy with action and views compassion as a potentially proactive approach to social equity. Because of the complex ethics involved in this endeavor, this project must also ask: how might we use human centered, participatory design and critical race theory to ethically design these experiences while motivating and supporting audiences to engage? In this way, this project proposes to use a range of design tool fidelities to discover and design for barriers to coalition building, and thus forge a bottom-up pathway from the people being represented to their IVE representations. The products of this project include a literature review and a suggested protocol for the ethical production of IVEs designed to facilitate coalition building across difference using human centered, participatory design, and critical race theory.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is when companies make an effort to improve society through their business practices. Corporate Social Responsibility is a growing topic and has been researched extensively and implemented mostly among large corporations, garnering the attention of stakeholders, sponsors, investors, and media. Researchers have conducted meta-analysis on the effects of CSR on financial performance of companies and found that though implementing CSR activities can result in an expense for the company, the overall benefits of CSR, such as increases in public support, employee satisfaction, investor’s involvement, and community engagement, far outweigh the cost. However, little is known on the impact of the size of a company and the effects of CSR and financial performance. The goal of this research is to identify, based on the size of a company, the effects of CSR on financial performance and examine whether CSR results in financial benefits. Data will be extracted from three large, three medium, and two small profit companies and analyzed following existing protocols and procedures for conducting a systematic review. For each company, I will examine its CSR report and identify studies that used more than two outcome measures (e.g., environmental sustainability, human right advocacy, empowering employees, etc.) of CSR to determine financial performance. The significance of my research is its potential to provide context-specific findings that could inform managers from small to large companies how engaging in CSR activities may be beneficial.