NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Les collections de littérature jeunesse à contenu LGBTQ dans les bibliothèques publiques québécoises : portrait et évaluation

The purpose of this study is to examine the stocks of young adult and children’s literature collections with LGBTQ content made available in Québec public libraries to determine whether the population is sufficiently provided for, regardless of the location and size of the city or town where they live. To carry out this research project, we used the checklist evaluation method. Collections from a sample of 41 municipal public libraries were thus examined, using a checklist of 38 young adult and children’s literature titles with LGBTQ content, published from 2003 to 2018. The collected data was subjected to statistical analysis. As with previous studies of Canadian and American public library collections, this research has shown that the level of presence of young adult and children’s literature with LGBTQ content varies considerably in all libraries, and that the size of populations, the size of collections and the budgets for printed books can’t explain all the fluctuations. Data analysis also revealed that novels with LGBTQ content for teenagers were much more likely to be held in collections than early readers’ novels and children’s picture books. The results have also shown that male homosexuality as a theme is well represented in the collections, while same sex parenthood is significantly underrepresented. However, according to the data, the picture books for children on the topic of same-sex parenthood are exactly the type of material which was the most borrowed in the sampled libraries at the time of the study. This exploratory study alone does not entirely support the conclusion that collections of young adult and children’s literature with LGBTQ content in Québec public libraries are sufficient and appropriate. However, comparing results from this research to those from other researches suggests that, overall, Quebec libraries seem to be doing well in this regard.

Keyphrases: Collections, LGBTQ, Censure, Homophobie, Public libraries, Subject headings, Young adult fiction, Children’s literature, LGBTQ content, Homophobia, Censorship, Gender identity, Sexual diversity, Indexation
Étude des activités identifiables par les déchets reliés au jeu de balle maya au Classique terminal au site Ucanal, Guatemala

The archaeological site of Ucanal, located in the Petén region of Guatemala near the border with Belize, is a Maya site with a large population and active ceremonial centre during the Terminal Classic, a period in which other sites were wrought with political turmoil or were in the process of being abandoned. The ballcourts located in civic centers have often been researched from the perspective of formal ceremonial activities and the elite. This thesis proposes to study the debris from middens located on the outskirts of the Ucanal site ballcourt in order to study the activities practiced by spectators instead of focusing solely on the formal activities within the court itself. To do so, a holistic documentation of all the artifacts (lithic, ceramic and fauna) was conducted from excavations of ballcourt #1 of group A of Ucanal. Artifact distribution analyses between different zones of the ballcourt and between the ballcourt and other areas of the site were undertaken to identify the possible range of activities associated with Ucanal’s ballcourt. The results show that in addition to the ritual activities generally documented in the context of ball games, Ucanal's ballcourt was associated with feasting activities which involved freshwater shells and possibly the accompaniment of music and gambling.

Keyphrases: roturiers, Ucanal, maya, ballgame, ballcourt, middens, dump, garbage, feasts, rituals, elites, commoners, Terminal Classic
L’urbanisme tactique et ses acteurs : étude de deux cas montréalais : Viaduc 375 et le Champ des Possibles

Tactical urbanism is dedicated to the quick and flexible resolve of urban issues and allows to operate progressively and temporally on public spaces. Considering its recent developments and the notable interest from different types of actors, it seems relevant to apprehend tactical urbanism from the point of view of its main actors, active participants and instigators of projects related to this practice. This master's thesis proposes to adopt an approach based on tactical urbanism experiences in the Montreal context through a case study. The cases selected for this master's thesis are Viaduc 375 and le Champ des Possibles, which represent distinct approaches to this practice, thus making it possible to obtain a broad and pluralistic scope. This research made evident several observations of the current state of this practice, particularly on the positioning of its main actors, through a series of ten semi-structured interviews conducted with members of both projects and the use of scientific literature discussing tactical urbanism from different perspectives. The conclusions made within this master's thesis suggest that there are some important discrepancies between the visions upheld by researchers and actors of tactical urbanism. Finally, the definition of this concept is made increasingly difficult by the distorted recuperation mechanisms used by originally external actors, confirming a disunity of the concept.

Keyphrases: Tactical urbanism, Actors, Case Study, Actors' perception, Relations with public authorities
Les enjeux de la marche en banlieue dans un contexte de vieillissement : proposition d’une stratégie pour rendre des environnements de faible densité plus favorables à la marche pour les personnes âgées

Enhancing walkability of public space for the elderly living in suburban areas often means intervening in environments that are of low density, where functions are highly segregated and where walking infrastructures are lacking in quality or simply don’t exist. While many studies have done the demonstration that high density, mix land use, and walking facilities tend to support the decision to walk among all ages, how can suburban public administrations plan fruitful interventions to support walking among the elderly? Based on available documentation, this study identifies the most relevant criteria to locate and shape interventions meant to enhance walkability of public spaces for the elderly living in existing suburbs. Based on these criteria, the study then proposes interventions for the specific suburban neighborhood of Cartier in Laval, Quebec, Canada.  This second phase of the study involves mixed methods with semi-directed interviews, walking interviews and participatory workshops to validate and bring precision to the process and criteria identified in the previous stage of study. To enhance the walkability of public space for elderly living in suburban areas, the results of this study suggest that urban intervention should at first focus on removing obstacles to walking. They also suggest that accessibility to leisure destinations as well as attractiveness of the path are part of the most relevant criteria to consider. According to those findings, interventions planned to enhance walkability of suburbs towards the elderly should take into primary account preferences related to leisure and path attractiveness. In line with the results of several recent studies on the subject, the study also concludes to the importance of involving older people in intervention processes to increase the walkability of the suburbs.

Keyphrases: Walkability, Suburbs, Elderly, Active mobility
Entre complexité et mise en œuvre : l’interprétation de l’adaptation aux changements climatiques en contexte municipal québécois

For a long time, when facing the daunting challenge of climate changes, the emphasis has been put on the efforts to mitigate greenhouses gases emissions. Yet, when it became clear that our ecosystems were subjects to some deep transformations that were irreversible, the notion of “adaptation” slowly gain traction at the turn of the 21st century. Thus, while the municipalities, as government of proximity, are considered as increasingly important actors in this adaptation scheme, the program Climat-Municipalité offered the opportunity to four municipal entities in Quebec to produce a Climate Change Adaptation Plan (CCAP) between 2009 and 2016. The question is then raised: how is climate change adaptation interpreted at the local level in Quebec? And, to be more specific, how is the Adaptation interpreted as a process and how is Adaptation interpreted as an action? After all, one the greatest challenge of Adaptation is that difficult transition from awareness of climate issues to the operationalization of this realization, whether through concrete implementation or even through a simply better and complex understanding of the hardships faced by our society. Indeed, this global phenomenon of climate change, that can be felt throughout this planet where few ecosystems escape human influence, is at the same time a technical, psychological and sociopolitical challenge. As our analysis of the CCAP of Trois-Rivières, Sherbrooke and Laval shows, those plans represent great “first steps” in the right direction, but they are still insufficient. Their ambition, their inner mechanics and their reach are, at least for now, too limited to guarantee the stability and sustainability of territories and populations. Their mostly short-term and reactive vision helps prepare for today’s challenges but doesn’t ensure our societies the capacity to face tomorrow’s shocks.

Keyphrases: Adaptation, Climate Change, Adaptation, Climate Change Adaptation Plan, Municipal government, Environmental governance
L’expérience de l’eau à travers l’artefact urbain : le cas de Montréal

Like other cities, Montreal is facing global warming and increasing urbanization. As a result, heat waves intensify to the point of becoming a serious public health issue causing discomfort and death among city dwellers. Current measures to mitigate heat islands include greening and spraying water. The latter is particularly critical in the local context: Montreal has become an impervious island gradually disconnecting from its rivers and streams, losing a valuable heritage. The design of water features—like fountains, ponds, water games—could follow policies aimed at adapting to climate change and improving pedestrian environments. However, currently offered water features do not all meet the needs of users, notably in terms of universal accessibility criteria. This study will adopt a user-centred industrial design perspective to better understand how water features can foster positive and inclusive experiences among urban dwellers. We will set our ideas of design and experience by adopting a phenomenological and constructivist approach, using concepts of aesthetic experience and habitability. We will analyze our main subject according to the concept of the Human Scale City developed by architect Jan Gehl and adopted by the city of Montreal. This theoretical corpus will help us understand the contextual, social and sensory characteristics of urban water features.  First, a literature review will reveal how the historical evolution of functions and uses related to water features influences their design and popularity nowadays. Then, we will observe and compare two modern fountains to induce which qualities foster their success. In this aim, we will analyze the results of the observations on three scales: 1) the contextual and socio-cultural environment of the neighborhood, 2) the integration to the surrounding built environment, and 3) the users and their interactions with the water feature.  Our main goal is to study the urban experience of water and demonstrate the relevance of the design approach to tackle the modern city challenges. Thus, we hope to sensitize the various actors involved in the implementation of urban water features, and more broadly contribute to the corpus on the impact of the design on the public space.

Keyphrases: artefact urbain, industrial design, user experience, urban artefact, water feature, human scale, water, city, fountain
Design de jeux pour la santé : utilisation de jeux sérieux pour favoriser l’adhésion aux exercices thérapeutiques chez des jeunes patients atteints de fibrose kystique

At around the age of 7 years old, younger patients diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) are usually prescribed a new therapy using positive expiratory pressure (PEP). For PEP therapy, patients are required to perform a series of repetitive and methodical breathing exercises to improve lung capacity among other health benefits. However, these exercises can be boring and demotivating for young children. As a result, daily adherence rate to PEP therapy is less than 50%. In turn, this affects the quality of life and long-term health of patients as well as directly impacting their families. In the education and health sectors, serious games are already used with children to help them with learning, therapy and even physical rehabilitation. Serious games leverage the fun and interactive aspects of video games to motivate and improve the commitment of the player to learn the targeted material or adhere to a specific health behaviour. This research-creation project seeks to validate the efficacy of using games specially designed to help patients adhere to PEP therapy exercises more regularly. The objective is to encourage them to get involved in their daily exercises and to facilitate the learning and application of the breathing techniques. This playful approach ultimately aims to improve the quality of life of CF children over time. Leveraging a multi and interdisciplinary collaboration between students from University of Montreal and specialists from the CF clinic at CHU Ste-Justine, three games prototypes and an electronic device prototype, used to control the games, were developed for the most popular PEP device in North America (PariPEP®). The games and electronic device prototypes were tested at the CF clinic, within the hospital for children, as part of a pilot study with 10 young patients, aged from 8 to 10 years old.

Keyphrases: Collaboration, CHU Ste-Justine, Cystic Fibrosis (CF), PEP Therapy, Therapeutic adherence, Games, Health, Games for health, Serious Games, Breathing games
Evolution and integration of the Greek community of Greater Montreal : a perspective across three generations

The research aims to explore the experiences in the city of three generations of Greek-Canadians over a period of roughly 60 years. By tracing the evolution of Montreal’s Greek community, this project aims to identify how a city goes from having ethnic neighbourhoods to having ethnicities living fluidly in its urban neighbourhoods. Previously, ethnic neighbourhoods existed as a physical space within the city. With new mobilities, ethnicities continue to live within the physical space of the city, but now also exist beyond it, moving through it, and changing how each subsequent generation identifies with its heritage and community of belonging. To achieve this goal and gain a better understanding, a series of semi-directed interviews were conducted. On the one hand, these interviews allowed for the mapping of different places in which daily life is based in at different key moments of immigration (arrival and subsequent settlements) and, on the other hand, explored the experiences and meanings associated with these places, where identities, attachments, and feelings of familiarity are discussed. The qualitative analysis of these allowed to construct a larger picture to see how each generation shapes and takes shape from the city. Three experiences in the city are brought to light: for the first generation, home and community take place in a foreign city; for the second generation, they live in a community firmly established within the metropolitan area, and for the third generation, they live in a community that has dispersed into socio-spatial hubs. This research allowed to confirm the existing literature of spatial assimilation among the Greek-Canadian diaspora, while also opening avenues to new ways of looking at this kind of assimilation through the lens of mobility.

Keyphrases: Immigration, Quartier ethnique, Integration, Lifestyle, Mobility, Ethnic neighborhood, Greek community
Étude et réappropriation du geste volontaire du musicien improvisateur dans le cadre d'une composition électroacoustique

This thesis looks at improvised music and its relationship to the stage through my experience and that of thirteen personalities from the arts world with whom I have had privileged interviews. The essence of this approach is to observe how creators use improvisation in concert situations or simply as a research method using digital or analog tools. This panorama allows me to put my composition and research work in perspective at a time when, as a creator, I have turned towards digital music after many years of writing and stage performance in the field of jazz and improvisational music. In passing, the causality of the gesture during performance with digital tools is problematic. The thesis first retraces a brief journey through improvised music - more particularly what is called musique actuelle or free improvisation. Through this overview, a few questions of nomenclature and aesthetics will be raised in order to better understand the issues specific to this music. The reflection continues with interviews through which I explore comprovisation, DJing, digital musical instruments, dance and composition. The reflection culminates around five of my works written in collaboration with the improvised music and dance communities.

Keyphrases: improvisation, comprovisation, réappropriation, DJing, indétermination, Digital music, Dance, Reappropriation, Gesture, Indeterminacy
Discursivités de l'islamisme dans les littératures francophones des pays à majorité musulmane

The twenty-first century is only just beginning and we can already see what the future conflicts will be like. In the United States, Canada or Europe, debates are more and more insistent on the questions of identity and the need to define itself in relation to the "Other". The need to define itself, but also more and more the need to protect "who we are" in the face of a world where everything is changing. In this thesis, I propose to read some of the most committed writers of their time within the Francophonie. Chahdortt Djavann, Amin Maalouf, Boualem Sansal and Atiq Rahimi are all from predominantly Muslim countries. Their literature is unquestionably an opened window on the cultures of their regions. But their literature is also an important material for the academic world for a better understanding of the times we live. I would like to use this corpus to understand an issue that has been at the center of the news for almost twenty years: Islamism. What is it about ? A culture ? A religion ? And in particular, what are the relations that the literary text has with this phenomenon? Asking the right questions and answering them in the most objective way is certainly the first step towards a better mutual understanding between two regions that must necessarily coexist in harmony: East and West.

Keyphrases: postcolonialisme, Islamism, East, West, postcolonialism, interdiscursivity
Coût-efficacité en vie réelle du ticagrélor : double thérapie antiplaquettaire pour l'infarctus du myocarde au Québec, Canada

In Canada, there are approximately 21,000 deaths and 84,069 hospitalizations related to myocardial infarction (MI) per year, representing approximately Can$1.27 billion in direct costs related to acute and chronic care. Despite the demonstrated health benefits of dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT) after an MI, observed real-world persistence to treatment with ticagrelor-based DAPT in Québec is lower than that observed with other P2Y12 receptor inhibitors. The objective of this project was to develop a decision-making model to evaluate the cost-utility ratio of ticagrelor-DAPT under conditions of imperfect persistence in Quebec patients suffering from MI, and thus to determine whether a province-wide intervention to increase persistence would be justifiable. A decision tree describing the patient course in the first year following an MI was developed in order to compare four different durations of persistence with perfect adherence with ticagrelor-DAPT (3, 6, 9 and 12 months) to perfect adherence with a 12-month regimen clopidogrel-DAPT (reference treatment). Three clinical events were modeled: recurrent MI, cardiovascular death and major bleeding. The probabilities of these events were extracted from relevant randomized clinical trials using published Kaplan-Meier survival curves. The utilities needed to calculate the QALYs were derived from the literature. The costs were estimated from the Canadian literature and the list of medications from the Régie de l'assurance maladie du Québec and were expressed in Can$ 2018. The reference case analysis consisted of a probabilistic Monte Carlo simulation. At a mean cost per quality adjusted life year (QALY) gained of Can$43,398, the results of the base case analysis showed that 3 months of ticagrelor-DAPT had a 59.31% likelihood of being considered cost-effective using a willingness-to-pay threshold of Can$50,000/QALY. Moreover, the sensitivity analyses showed that the cost-effectiveness of ticagrelor-DAPT was sensitive to the cost of cardiovascular death and the cost of ticagrelor. Assuming a cost of ticagrelor compatible with a generic drug, the 4 durations of persistence with ticagrelor-DAPT are almost guaranteed to be profitable. When a generic cost of ticagrelor was assumed, 3 months, 6 months and 9 months of ticagrelor-DAPT were dominant and 12 months of ticagrelor-DAPT were highly likely to be cost-effective (98.8%). This analysis also conclude that as little as 3 months of ticagrelor-DAPT is likely to be cost-effective compared to 12 months of clopidogrel-DAPT. With a moderate to strong level of evidence, we therefore conclude that no specific intervention is warranted at the provincial policy level to improve persistence rate with ticagrelor treatment after MI.

Keyphrases: Myocardial infarction, Ticagrelor, Persistence, Economic evaluation, Cost-effectiveness analysis, Cost-utility analysis, Modeling, Decision analysis, Health policy
Carrière criminelle lucrative et désistement assisté

Research on assisted desistance focuses on how formal or informal interventions support the cessation of criminal activity. As interest in this subject is relatively recent, knowledge in the area is still in the early stages and there is little empirical work on how the characteristics of criminal involvement influence receptiveness to intervention. For example, although the majority of crimes are motivated by monetary gain, there is little information about the desistance of persons involved in lucrative crimes. This study, which is based on the narratives of 27 people who had committed such crimes, examines perceptions of assistance received. We looked first at the nature of the assistance in the desistance process and then determined when and how this assistance was related to the life course of respondents. Our findings show the importance of understanding the process that leads to the end of the criminal career, as assisted desistance facilitated the abandonment of criminal behavior in the majority of the individual trajectories studied. Results also show that assistance can take different forms, that it acts in two distinct ways, and that it can take place at different times in the desistance process.

Keyphrases: Criminal career, Assisted desistance, Lucrative crime, Desistance, Narrative life stories