Institutional Repository
The UDSpace Institutional Repository collects and disseminates research material from the University of Delaware.
- Faculty, staff, and graduate students can deposit their research material directly into UDSpace. Faculty may use UDSpace to fulfill the University of Delaware Faculty Senate Open Access Resolution, and in many cases may use it to fulfill open access requirements from grant funding agencies.
- Departments can use UDSpace to publish or distribute their working papers, technical reports, or other research material.
- UDSpace also includes all doctoral dissertations from winter 2014 forward, and all master's theses from fall 2009 forward.
To learn more about UDSpace, and how you can make your research openly accessible to the public, visit our UDSpace Policies website.
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Recent Submissions
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Miss-Taken Identities: The Comedy of Misrecognition in New Woman Short Stories
(Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, 2022-10-01) Stetz, Margaret D.
This essay will illuminate a surprisingly common trope in British New Woman comic short stories from the late-1880s through the end of the nineteenth century—that is, the social misrecognition of women (almost always young women) by men. Often, this misidentification takes a class-based turn, with men of the upper classes assuming that the girls they encounter in socially ambiguous spaces belong to a class lower than their own and are, therefore, undeserving of the usual forms of respectful courtesy, or are even appropriate targets for sexual predation. These same men often display pre-existing prejudices against women who are smart, talented, and independent. In the course of the narratives that follow, the misidentified female protagonists offer comic correction, re-educating not only the erring men, but also the reader beyond the text. Such stories use the structure of a joke to reshape the understanding of both the diegetic masculine figures within the story and the extradiegetic audience and to advance the cause of the “New Woman” in general by representing this controversial social type as clever, wise, competent, appealing, and even funny. The essay focuses on a number of examples of this phenomenon, including stories by Mabel E. Wotton, Beatrice Harraden, Sarah Grand, and Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.
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Envelopes
(University of Delaware Library. Special Collections, 1895) Dunbar-Nelson, Alice
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Economic and labor market responses to demographic changes
(University of Delaware, 2022) Li, Jiani
China is turning into an aging society and there is a growing percentage of older people in this country. Currently, the country has the world’s largest older population (persons who are over or equal to the age of 65) and the United Nations also projects that there will be 366 million older population by the year 2050. It seems that the country is experiencing population aging on an unprecedented scale. ☐ Generally speaking, population aging is assumed to have an adverse impact on economic growth since it will reduce the proportion of the population that is economically active. In addition, given the fact that institutional care and community-based care are far from satisfying the needs of older people, families have been the primary sources of care for the older population. The working-age labor force need to provide caregiving to their older parents and may choose to live near them, and thus it may affect the labor market outcomes of their working-age children. ☐ For China, there is little empirical evidence exploring the magnitude of the population aging effect on economic growth or the labor market. In this study, I construct a city panel dataset where the data was observed every 5 years in 2000 to 2015. Specifically, I use the predicted variation in the rate of population aging across Chinese cities to estimate the impact of population aging on city level GDP per capita and labor market outcomes. I find that a 10% increase in the extent of population aging (extent is measured by the fraction of the population aged over or equal to 65 years) would decrease GDP per capita by 2.42 %. On the other hand, a 10% increase in the extent of population aging would increase the average wage by 1.67%. There is heterogeneity in the effect across different periods and across different regions — with the effect more significant in less-developed cities. When decomposing the effect of population aging on economic growth into labor participation and labor productivity, I find that the effect of age composition mainly operates through the decrease in the labor-to-population ratio. When decomposing the effect by sector, I find there is a significant adverse effect on the secondary sector output, but there is no clear trend of how population aging would affect the development path of a city.
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Deep learning facilitated filament extraction towards quantitative analysis of filamentous structures
(University of Delaware, 2022) Liu, Yi
Filamentous objects are ubiquitous in biological images, and segmenting filament instances is fundamental for quantitative biological research. Deep learning-based methods have shown remarkable performance in recent years on various instance segmentation tasks. However, existing approaches are not applicable for filament extraction due to the unique properties of filaments. Unlike objects with well-defined boundaries and centers, filaments are extremely thin, non-rigid, varying in shape, sharing similar local patterns, and often spanning widely over the image with numerous crossovers. These properties significantly impede the ability of current deep learning approaches to learn their shape and disentangle individual filaments. ☐ In this dissertation, I aim to develop deep learning facilitated methods for filament extraction. I first introduce a U-shape-based neural network for filament segmentation. The proposed method outperforms existing segmentation methods on actin filament and microtubule datasets. I then propose a framework combining a keypoint detection neural network and a fast-marching algorithm to extract and quantify the segments of filament networks. My proposed method does not skew the original layout of filamentous structures and achieves higher accuracy than traditional methods. ☐ Furthermore, I have developed three deep learning facilitated methods to extract complete filament instances for different use cases. I first propose an orientation-aware neural network to disentangle filaments by sorting them into six different layers by their orientation angles. A terminus pairing algorithm is also proposed for post-process and forming complete instances. The proposed method works best for extracting long and thin filaments. Then I propose a novel approach for filament extraction by transforming the instance segmentation problem into a sequence modeling problem. The proposed method segments each instance by tracing them from their tips with a sequential encoder-decoder framework, simulating the process of humans extracting filaments and achieving the best performance on thicker filaments. The last approach I introduce is filament disentangler, a bottom-up method for filament extraction. The proposed method dissects the filament network into segments with predicted junctions and outlines. Dissected segments are then grouped into full filament instances utilizing novel connection-aware embeddings and orientation-aware threads. The proposed methods achieve the lowest processing time and competitive performance. All methods are evaluated on synthetic filament datasets and various filament datasets, including microtubule, Planktothrix rubescens (P. rubescens), and Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). ☐ This dissertation also emphasizes alleviating the data shortage problem. I implemented methods to generate synthetic filaments for training and evaluation. I also collected several real filament datasets, including a microtubule and actin filament dataset with semantic labels and a microtubule dataset with instance labels. In the experiments, I show that the proposed filament extraction methods can be trained on synthetic datasets and evaluated on real filaments, reducing the annotation workload and making it feasible to use deep learning with less manual annotated data.
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Politics of transnational film remakes: Turkish and German national cinemas
(University of Delaware, 2022) Öz, Seda
In his introduction to Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, Thomas Leitch observes that “the scope of adaptation studies remains largely Anglo-American rather than international; indeed, many adaptation scholars outside the English-speaking world prefer to focus on Hollywood adaptation studies” (6). Highlighting the field’s lack of interest in different voices and examples from world cinema, and especially marginal cinemas, Leitch emphasizes the exigency of a turn in adaptation studies to break down the information bubble that has left the conversation in a loop since its beginning, a turn that can be achieved, or at least ignited, by international scholars and should be supported by Anglo-American institutions. Seeing the importance of such a direction, my dissertation, “Politics of Remaking,” traces the impact of this Anglocentric position by considering how adaptation studies evolved, as well as how and where remakes are positioned within the field due to dominant scholars and scholarship and how this positioning affects discussions on transnational remakes and the directions that may or may not be offered with such a trend in the academia. ☐ The scholarship on remakes is very limited. Moreover, film scholars’ discussions of transnational remakes have largely been limited to exchanges between one national culture and another, with the focus on cross-cultural fertilizations, appropriations, or domination of one culture by another. By studying the remaking practices of German and Turkish cinemas, I challenge the notion of “transnational,” a term that is currently reserved to crossing borders between different nations and national cinemas. My aim is to diversify and internationalize film studies while enabling future scholars to study transnational cinema under a more generous paradigm. ☐ In chapter one, I analyze the evolution of adaptation studies and the current standing of remakes within the field. My aim is to analyze the dominant position of Anglo-American scholarship and the ways in which it affects the approaches scholars take toward transnational remakes and the directions they avoid. In chapter two, I challenge existing trends by exploring Turkish cinema and its remakes of Hollywood films from the 1960s to the 1980s, a period during which Turkey went through two actual and four attempted coup d’etats. While current scholarship on remakes argues that the motive for remaking is the success of the original film and its potential acceptance by a new audience, I argue that Turkish cinema’s embrace of remakes stemmed rather from internal economic, industrial, and political problems that did not emphasize the original films’ familiarity and relevance but the remakes’ distant and alien nature, raising the question whether we can refer to these films as “transnational” even though they cross national borders. To do so, I do close readings of two Turkish mockbuster films. First is Nejat Saydam’s My Friend Frankenstein (Sevimli Frankenştayn, 1975), which is a remake of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974), and the second is Metin Erksan’s Satan (Şeytan, 1979), a Turkish remake of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). In chapter three, I turn to German film remakes made between the 1920s and the 1960s, another politically turbulent time in history. The aim of film remakes in Germany, which had recycled its own history, was to rewrite the Weimar past in Nazi Germany in an era that questioned the concept of nation with its racial anxieties. I argue that although German cinema remade its own films, the remakes that were produced within national borders were even more “transnational” than their counterparts that have been identified as transnational in their revelations of cultural and political clashes. In this chapter, I look at the remakes of Hanns Heinz Ewers’s 1911 novel Alraune, made in 1928, 1930,1952, and F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann) and its 1955 remake directed by Harald Braun. In chapter four, I discuss the relationship between nations, genres, and remakes. By looking at the remaking practices of nations in different times and places, I speculate about the generic convention and uses of remakes and how we can refer to them as a genre of its own.