eResearch Seminar and Fellowships
The CeR sponsors digital and internet-based research and creative activity through a weekly seminar series involving faculty-student teams from across the University of Missouri campus. Students apply for eResearch fellowships carrying a stipend of $1000, and research teams make a presentation to the interdisciplinary seminar each week. Participation is open to both undergraduate and graduate students from all MU colleges: Agriculture, Arts and Science, Business, Education, Engineering, Health Professions, Human Environmental Sciences, Journalism, Law, Medicine, Nursing, and Veterinary Medicine. The schedule below includes links to the abstracts and presentations.
eResearch Seminar Presentations
February 15, 2008 - S204 Memorial Union
Alumni Presentation
Department of Anthropology
Carolyn Orbann
Lisa Sattenspiel
Title: An Agent-Based Computer Simulation of Infectious Disease Epidemics in Newfoundland, Canada
This encore presentation was originally presented on November 2, 2007.
February 22, 2008 - S204 Memorial Union
Center for eResearch
John Foley, Director
LuAnne Roth, Associate Editor
Mark Jarvis, IT Manager
Kathy Andresen, Administrative Assistant
Title: Ongoing Projects @ CeR
The Center for eResearch fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange via digital and internet-based media. It seeks to democratize academic research by using electronic tools and strategies to remove barriers to learning and knowledge-sharing, and to promote a broader, more inclusive, and more diverse academic community. The CeR supports campus-level, national, and international research efforts through a series of projects:
Oral Tradition, an online, open-access, free-of-charge international academic journal.
eEdition, a digital, web-based edition of The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey.
The Pathways Project, a multimedia venture that explores the similarities and correspondences between humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies.
SyndicateMizzou, an online resource for research news, presents the research and creative activities of University of Missouri faculty in their very own words.
MizzouTube, currently under development, will serve as a video-sharing site for the University of Missouri community.
It may take a moment for the video to load.
Full-size Presentation
February 29, 2008 - S204 Memorial Union
Women and Gender Studies
Jennifer Kimball
Mike StadlerTitle: Open Source Sounds:
KOPN Reel-To-Reel Radio ArchivesKOPN-FM community radio's reel-to-reel sound recordings collection reflects the history of mid-Missouri and the nation. However, reel-to-reel recordings have a limited life-span.
Though the reel-to-reel project has reformatted several hundred tapes, many of these programs are not cataloged, making use of them difficult. Moreover, the programs are inaccessible to many potential listeners and researchers.
For this study, 65 reformatted tapes will be catalogued from the Local Issues Collection, focusing on the Of the People series and The Inside Story: Missouri Prisons series. The programs will be put on the project website for free listening.
Both series were produced in the 1970s and 1980s for KOPN. Of the People was a panel and interview show focusing on international issues’ relevance to mid-Missourians. KOPN's prison issues series is a primary source about an extremely marginalized group of people.
Programs will be abstracted, and will then be put on the project website with abstracts and an index. Data on program topics and content will be gathered. The process of constructing a catalog and webpage devoted to the programs will illuminate a variety of challenges, pitfalls, and rewards of working with information and archival records produced by diverse people in a non-academic setting.
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Full-size Presentation
March 14, 2008 - S204 Memorial Union
Architectural Studies
Danielle Oprean
So-Yeon YoonTitle: Understanding the Meaning of Color Environments among the Elderly: A Virtual Environment Exploratory Study
The United States has one of the fastest growing elderly populations in the world. To build better health-care facilities for this growing population, research on how the environment affects the elderly is necessary. Color is a fundamental element of environmental design linked to psychological, physiological, and social reaction of human beings as well as aesthetic and technical aspects of human-made environments. Despite the importance of color in design there is little research being conducted on the affects of color on environments for the elderly. The faculty-research team will be investigating the effect of color on elderly health-care facility environments using virtual reality (VR). Creating a realistic mockup environment would be to challenging due to all of the variables involved. VR is the solution chosen for this problem because of the realistic perceptive qualities users experience and because adding interaction like color change can be done with the click of a mouse. The realistic representation from the VR simulation should help provide a more accurate perspective on the color element of elderly facility planning and design. Also, the use of the VR system for testing will provide insight into how the elderly accept and adapt to new technology.
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Full-size Presentation
April 4, 2008 - S204 Memorial Union
School of Information Science and Learning Technologies
Hui-Hsien Tsai
Gail FitzgeraldTitle: Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) for Students with Disabilities: Usability Testing of the Web Support Site with Special Education Teachers
Research supports the use of electronic performance support system (EPSS) as an effective approach in assisting students' self-regulation, learning, and success in school. To date there has been very limited research on the implementation of EPSS technologies to assist students who are at-risk of failure and dropping out from schools (Fitzgerald, 2005). Strategy Coach is a research-based support web environment that has been developed to assist high school students with disabilities to learn and use EPSS tools for behavioral self-regulation, learning strategies, and preparation for transition from high school. Strategy Coach also contains training and support materials for teachers and students in these procedures. No evaluation from the user's perspective has been conducted with the Strategy Coach web site. The purpose of this study is to investigate user's perspective in using Strategy Coach in terms of user satisfaction and system effectiveness. Two types of usability testing will be conducted: expert heuristic evaluations and the users' exploratory testing with six special education teachers and three usability experts. Results from usability testing will be analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative methods.
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Full-size PresentationApril 11, 2008 - N232 Memorial Union
(Note the change of location for this seminar)
Department of English
Sarah Zurhellen
Jeff RiceTitle: Writing Speech: What Can Instant Messaging Teach Us About Language and Literacy?
Historically, all new developments in digital technology, from the Web onward, have evoked a crisis in popular rhetoric, and Instant Messaging (IM) is proving no different. From the public media to the discussion boards on InsideHigherEd.com, IM language is increasingly discussed using terminology that comes directly from the crisis rhetoric that so often surrounds language deviations threatening to disturb the status quo. However, if, as one Parent Teacher Council representative claims, IM language differs from Standard Written English in its ability to use students' natural tendencies to "think orally and write phonetically," then rather than decrying it as the end of the English language, perhaps we should welcome it as a new communication technology that blends oral and written literacies. In response to crisis rhetoric that undermines our ability to recognize new possibilities, I investigate how and why IM language developed and how and why it has evolved as new users and audiences have joined in, in order to assess its current function as a communication technology that exists somewhere between the oral and the written. Drawing on the research of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Eric Havelock, I explore how IM language merges effective communicative practices from oral and written technologies in order to create a new form of communication most efficient for the digital medium.
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Full-size Presentation
April 18, 2008 - 105 Townsend Hall
(Note the change of location for this seminar)
Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis
Nathan Stephens
Juanita SimmonsTitle: The Non-Cognitive Factors Impacting Black Male Educational Experiences and Graduation Rates
Despite the increasing numbers of Black students entering college, fewer complete their degrees than their White counterparts. The most recent analysis of the American Council on Education found that 44 percent of Black students completed four year degrees at four-year institutions compared to 54 percent of white students, 61 percent of Asian American students and 54 percent of American Indian students. (D'Augelli & Hershberger, 1993) For Black males the rate of graduation is significantly lower than white males despite similar collegiate grade point averages after the sophomore year. Researchers have attributed the difference to 'non-cognizant factors' such as discriminatory comments and actions towards minority students from white students and faculty that result in a negative campus climate. The negative educational environment coupled with other factors such as economic hardship hinders Black students' ability to persist to graduation. In particular, Black males are disproportionately affected. According the U.S Department of Education, in 1965, 45.9 percent of Black males graduated from college versus 37.3 percent in 1997. Drawing on the research by Dr. Shaun Harper, Dr. Tyrone Bledsoe and Dr. Micheal Cuyjet, I will examine this 'crisis' via a survey distributed to Black males at Historically Black Colleges and a predominately white college. In addition, conversations with Black male students on Facebook, Myspace and Blackplanet and HBCUconnect to determine what institutions of higher education can do to provide a more supportive environment for Black males.
April 25, 2008 - 233 Brady Commons
(Note the change of location for this seminar)
College of Business/Marketing
Shrihari Sridhar
Esther Thorson
Murali MantralaTitle: Transitioning to the Online Channel: Investment Strategies for Hybrid Newspapers
Two recent trends that newspapers have seen include the plummeting of print-revenue (6.5% drop in the last decade) and the soaring of online-revenue (23% increase in the last 6 years). This has led to a marketplace with 'hybrid' papers that generate advertising revenue through print and online sources by exposing their readers to their news in multiple channels. To be able to build a successful hybrid paper, newspapers should capture the two-sided nature of newspaper demand; specifically, a newspaper's subscription base enables it to accrue both print and online ad-revenue but too many ads can drive readers away from the newspaper. The challenge for a hybrid newspaper is thus to carefully balance its investments in the newsroom and advertising departments. This project consists of two steps a) the estimation of a dynamic econometric model that captures the relatedness between investments and revenue (offline and online) and b) understanding the role of offline investments in developing online success. Time-series data from a large newspaper company has been received for this purpose.
May 2, 2008 - S203 Memorial Union
(Note the change of location for this seminar)
Feedback Session
