bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
One dose of Architecture, taken daily: Building for Mental Health in New Zealand
Authors:   , McLaughlan Rebecca 
Published: November 2021

<p>Thousands of New Zealanders were treated in the nation’s mental hospitals in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Existing research has examined this history of institutionalisation from the perspectives of policy, psychiatric medicine and nursing culture, but to date little has been written about the built fabric of this type of institutional care. This dissertation asks what does the architectural approach taken to Seacliff Asylum (1878-84), Kingseat Hospital (1927-40) and Cherry Farm Hospital (1943-71) indicate about official attitudes to mental illness in New Zealand. Architecture was thought to be capable of performing a curative role in the treatment of mental illness; the administrators of New Zealand’s mental hospitals stated this belief publically in various press releases and reports to the government between 1878 and 1957. This dissertation examines Seacliff, Kingseat and Cherry Farm against current thought regarding the treatment of mental illness and against best architectural practice in mental hospital design. While these three institutions were the jewels in the crown of New Zealand’s mental hospital network, only Kingseat could be considered an exemplary hospital of its time. The compromises that occurred in the construction of Seacliff, Kingseat and Cherry Farm hospitals indicate that meeting the needs of the mentally ill was only one of a number of agendas that were addressed by the officials involved in the design of these institutions. Many of these agendas were peripheral to the delivery of mental health care, such as the political desire for colonial propaganda and professional concerns of marginalisation, and conflicted with the attainment of ideal environments for the treatment of mental illness. The needs of the mentally ill were a low priority for successive New Zealand governments who exhibited a reluctance to spend taxpayer funds on patients who were not considered curable. The architects and medical advisors involved in the design of these facilities did attempt to meet the needs of these patients; however, they were limited by a design and procurement process that elevated political and operational concerns over the curative potential of these hospitals. This dissertation also examines the role of individuals in the design of these institutions. Architect Robert Lawson was reproached for deficiencies in the curative potential of Seacliff Asylum. Similarly, medical administrator Theodore Gray has received criticism for limiting the development of New Zealand’s wider network of mental hospital care. This dissertation establishes that Lawson and Gray deserve greater recognition for their relative contributions to the architecture created, within New Zealand, for the treatment of mental illness.</p>
Who visits academic institutional repositories and why?: An analytical approach for a single high profile repository
Authors:   , Angelo Anton Findlay 
Published: November 2021

<p>Institutional Repositories have been set up all over the world, and are now mainstream business for academic libraries and other organisations. The nature of the visitors or users for these repositories is not well understood, and little work has been done in analysing the data the repositories generate on their visitors. This report looks at the analytics generated by the University of Canterbury Research Repository (UCRR) through its own internal statistics and Google Analytics. There are many issues with reconciling this data, as many factors influence the accuracy of the figures, including web search engine crawlers, deep linking, and copyright trolls. This report found that there are many visitors to the UCRR, and that it is difficult, but possible to create narratives for specific items indicating how they might be used. Generalisations, however are much harder to make, and though we can see who is visiting the UCRR, we cannot really ascertain why they do. This report provides suggestions for further research on repository users, particularly at gathering qualitative data from groups identified from this quantative analytics.</p>
RFID on the boundary between the public and private sectors: An ANT/Institutional Theory investigation
Authors:   , Vos Marta Elizabeth 
Published: November 2021

<p>Radio frequency identification (RFID) enabled devices are becoming increasingly common in today’s world, facilitating many things from supply chain efficiencies to medical equipment tracking. The majority of studies into such systems centre on technical and engineering issues associated with their implementation and operation. Research outside of this scope generally focuses on RFID systems in isolated private sector supply chains. Less common is research on RFID systems within the public sector, and this research generally occurs within the health, defence, or agriculture areas. Using a combination of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Institutional Theory, this qualitative study examines how RFID is used within the public sector/private sector RFID network. Interactions across public and private sector RFID networks are examined in order to identify common themes within the network, and to determine where the needs of the two sectors diverge. Twelve themes were identified that acted as ANT mediators within the network, across three dimensions. These mediators differed in activity depending on where within the ANT translation they were strongest. A number of the mediators were also found to exert institutional pressures on organisations within the network, contributing to their strength during translation. The relationship between the two sectors was also examined. Findings indicated that some mediators were stronger within the public sector, particularly with respect to privacy and legislation. It was further found that the relationship between the two sectors was confused by the multiple different roles taken by the public sector within the translation. This multiplicity at times confused both public and private sector partners, leading to uncertainty within the network. This study contributes to research by addressing a gap in understanding of RFID systems in the public-private sector context. It also provides practitioners with a guideline as to which mediators should be addressed when contemplating an RFID system within this context, as well as indicating possible reasons the relationship between organisations in the two sectors may be challenging. In addition, the unusual combination of ANT and Institutional Theory contributes to theory by pointing towards a possible new way to investigate complex technology systems at the organisational level.</p>
Integrating Social Media and Business Process Improvement: Value Propositions and Opportunities for Corporates
Authors:   , Durga Ameera 
Published: November 2021

<p>The pervasiveness of social media and the pressure for corporates to be more agile in delivering to customer needs and expectations has led organisations to more business process improvement initiatives. Social Media’s features can drive organisation responsiveness to customer needs and change. Although social media is used aggressively in many businesses across the world, integration with business process improvement has not be been researched. This research focuses on the integration of social media into the business process improvement lifecycle to alleviate the current problems experienced in business process improvement. This research explores the current business process improvement issues and challenges and the value propositions of social media. A qualitative approach was used to collect data via multiple rounds of questionnaires with experts in business process improvement and social media. A conceptual research framework is proposed. Results are interpreted against the framework, leading to findings that include challenges and limitations. In practical terms, the research shows the possibilities and potential of social media in business process improvement by facilitating transparency, ease of communication and reducing cost during economic downturns. Despite extensive research in social media and business process improvement in their own right, there has been little progress on how the social media can be used as a tool in delivering business process improvements for organisations. Social media is an excellent collaboration tool for collecting valuable information for analysis and design from a larger stakeholder group. This paper addresses a gap in the literature relating to some of potential benefits of social media in business process improvement.</p>
Teachers’ perceptions of changes to teaching practice and the influence of professional development: Experienced EFL teachers in South Korea
Authors:   , Cho Jeong Hyun 
Published: November 2021

<p>This multiple-case study investigated experienced English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers’ perceptions of changes to teaching practice as a result of professional development (PD) in South Korea. The study used one-on-one semi-structured interviews as the primary data source to capture teachers’ views on changes to their practice and the impact of their PD experiences. The study drew upon cultural historical activity theory as a theoretical framework and the literature on PD and teacher change to understand the relationship between PD and teacher change, and the influences on this relationship. This study found that various aspects of the teachers’ context – the English education curriculum, teacher culture, the school environment, and education policy – and the complex interrelationship among these factors led these teachers to develop a passive attitude towards PD learning and implementation. So, despite engaging in diverse PD experiences over their career, they rarely considered implementing changes within their teaching practice. This study revealed these experienced EFL teachers’ overarching concern about their levels of English proficiency. It showed that they were inclined to value newly qualified teachers’ capability over their own long teaching experience. They felt isolated within a stagnant teacher culture where they perceived that there was limited support for professional development from either school or education policy. Finally, they felt caught between the conflicting demands of the English education curriculum and classroom teaching. These experienced EFL teachers might be encouraged to develop a more positive attitude if their expertise and capacity were acknowledged as valuable. This would require an investment of time and effort to allow them to prepare for and contribute to PD learning and implementation. Orchestrated efforts from policymakers, school administrators, and teachers could help bring about substantial changes in experienced teachers’ teaching practice and enable them to share their expertise with other educators.</p>
The Intimate Virtuoso: The Guitar, the Rhetoric of Transformation, and Issues of Spectacle in Music by Fernando Sor, Johann K. Mertz, and Giulio Regondi
Authors:   , Garrick Jamie 
Published: November 2021

<p>Studies of virtuosity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have tended to focus on the piano and the violin. These instruments were obviously virtuosic and lent themselves to visual and aural displays of power, most notably in the case of Liszt and Paganini. These virtuosi crafted spectacles that were often described with metaphors of power and violence. These spectacles came to characterise the virtuosity of the early nineteenth century. However, the guitar has been largely neglected in scholarship dealing with virtuosity from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is due, in large part, to the status of the guitar within that period. Though popular as an accompanying instrument and in the home, the guitar struggled to find a secure position as a legitimate solo instrument in the public arena. While guitarists such as Dionisio Aguado and Mauro Giuliani were described as ‘virtuosi’, their instrument, unlike the piano and the violin, did not give itself to a spectacle that conveyed notions of power and violence. Rather, the guitar is an intimate instrument, quieter than the piano or the violin, and utilising small movements in the hands. These aspects of the instrument, so often perceived as ‘limitations’ led many writers to dismiss it as an inappropriate instrument for performance in the public spheres occupied by the piano and the violin. Guitarist-composers sought to play to the guitar’s strengths in ways that contrasted with the conventional metaphors of power and violence. Some of these attempts rhetorically aligned the guitar with genres and instruments that carried greater cultural capital. Composers used orchestral metaphors and emphasised the guitar’s ability to imitate other instruments. Other guitarist-composers sought to create a greater spectacle both in and beyond the music itself by emphasising physical movements within the music and writing extra-musical gestures into the music. The rhetoric of transformation was used either by or about the guitarist-composers Fernando Sor, Dionisio Aguado, Johann Kaspar Mertz, and Giulio Regondi, all of whom this exegesis focuses on, demonstrating a desire to legitimise the guitar at a time when it struggled not only to find traction as a ‘serious’ classical instrument, but also a place amongst more obviously virtuosic instruments.</p>
‘A Likeness made From First Hand Witness’?: The Discursive Position of a Purported Crazy Horse Photograph
Authors:   , Russell Grace Campbell 
Published: November 2021

<p>This dissertation is concerned with the ways in which photographs are discursively deployed and used in the writing of history. More specifically, it will consider how photos, and the historical, scientific, ethnographic and romantic discourses surrounding them, are used to erase or ‘make safe’ the traces of the radical resistances of dominated groups within colonial frameworks. The case explored here concerns the tintype photograph claimed as being of the Lakota chief and warrior Crazy Horse (c.1840-1877). Exhibited by the Custer Battlefield Museum in Montana, the claim that this photograph is of Crazy Horse is controversial. It is generally thought that no visual likeness of Crazy Horse exists; and his refusal to be photographed can be read as a practice of opposition to his assimilation into colonial narratives and accounts of American frontier history. In claiming the photo to be of Crazy Horse, the history of his resistance is rewritten and repositioned. This changes the way he becomes knowable and understandable within the contexts of (neo)colonial discourses and narratives, in which Native Americans are often relegated to the past, and appear either as casualties of the policies of Manifest Destiny, or as a romantic other which has been symbolically integrated into American mythic culture. This dissertation focuses on how the claim that this photograph is of Crazy Horse is made, and how the various associated cultural fields (photography, historiography, museology) are affected by, and play into, such a claim. This involves identifying the discursive processes and disciplinary mechanisms through which meaning is produced in relation to a particular cultural object. It considers the supposed photograph of Crazy Horse as an example of how history assigns significance to objects “in terms of the possibilities they generate for producing or transforming reality” (de Certeau, 1986:202), rather than as representations or reflections of reality.</p>
An Analysis of the Information Architecture of New Zealand Tertiary Library Websites
Authors:   , Bledsoe Summer Michelle 
Published: November 2021

<p>Library websites are becoming more and more important as so much of a library’s content is accessed through its website. It is important that this is usable for the site’s users and that the information contained in the site is findable. In order for this to happen the site must have a good information architecture. This study was done firstly as a literature analysis to determine what is currently considered to be best practice in information architecture for library websites. This was then formed into a checklist of best practice criteria and was used to analyse a sample of New Zealand’s tertiary library websites to determine what areas that these sites were doing well with their information architecture and what areas may need improvement. The study found that in many areas the sites matched well with the criteria such as having effective site navigation systems and using clear label terms. There were also areas that needed improvement such as the prominence of the library branding and search tools needing to be more user-friendly. This study provides a good picture of the current state of New Zealand tertiary library sites information architecture that could be used when updating these sites and it also provides a good checklist that can be used in the analysis of other library sites. Future research could extend this project by analysing sites more thoroughly and it could also do a more specific analysis by looking at what a certain library’s users want and need in the information architecture of their library site.</p>
Hunter S. Thompson, Transmetropolitan, and the Evolution from Author to Character
Authors:   , Nelson Ashlee Amanda 
Published: November 2021

<p>This thesis examines American author Hunter S. Thompson, in the context of his own works – primarily Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rum Diary– as well as the representation of him as a character in the graphic text Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis. The evolution of Thompson from author to character and the development of that character in his own works is examined, as well as how this development allowed for his character to be fully realised in a completely fictional world. In turn, the fully developed use of Thompson’s character is the starting point for my analysis of Transmetropolitan could potentially be read as a work of New Journalism, albeit a fictional one. The first chapter examines how Thompson began writing himself as a character in his early fictional work The Rum Diary. Though largely overlooked by critics because of its long delayed publication and the focus on the more flashy and better known Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Rum Diary is critical to Thompson’s development of himself as a character in his works in particular, and to his development as an author in general. Though The Rum Diary is ostensibly a purely fictional novel, this chapter examines how the character Paul Kemp is actually largely autobiographical, and how Kemp is an early version of the same character Thompson uses in his later nonfiction. I then analyse the development of that nonfiction version, Raoul Duke, in Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As The Rum Diary is not actually purely fictional, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is not actually completely nonfictional. Thompson, as this chapter shows, did not believe in the divide between fact and fiction, and he uses the character he develops in Raoul Duke to write about himself while creatively embellishing the truth. I then look at how Thompson wrote himself so strongly into his character that he became inextricably viewed as actually being Raoul Duke, and how that character was in turn viewed and written about. The second chapter examines the legacy of Thompson’s fully formed self-characterisation, as it is picked up by another author and written in the fully fictional context of the graphic novel series Transmetropolitan. I consider how Transmetropolitan’s main character Spider Jerusalem continues Thompson’s self-as-character through his characterisation, behaviour, and language. Furthermore I analyse how, within the world of the series, Spider as a journalist continues Thompson’s legacy as a writer. The third and final chapter examines how Spider’s characterisation as a continuation of Thompson is an important contextual factor for considering Transmetropolitan as a work of New Journalism. I consider the connection to Thompson, the content of Spider’s articles, and the format in which the articles are depicted in the graphic novel</p>
A macro-financial theory of corporate financing and forecast modelling of market movements
Authors:   , Sutton David 
Published: November 2021

<p>This thesis identifies a gap in existing theories of corporate finance. This gap is an implication of a Keynesian-Minskian analysis of markets and market-based economies. From a founding theoretical perspective rooted in the view that markets are not reliably efficient the case is developed that past price trend extrapolation is an important factor in corporate financing decisions. At a macro-financial level, companies repurchase equity over periods of strong market rises, while increasing debt at the same time. During periods of sustained, substantial market decline debt is retired and large new equity issues occur. This change in corporate financing is implicitly expensive as relatively low prices are realised for the new stock issued at these times. These factors suggest that conventional theories of corporate financing decisions that rely on corporate rationality and optimisation do not provide a compelling fit with observations in the period 1980-2012. Moreover, inference to Minsky’s (1986) argument that companies are compelled through market declines to shore up their balance sheets provides a better fit with the evidence. These arguments form the basis for the development of the ‘extrapolative expectations’ theory of corporate finance. The second major development in this thesis draws on the theoretical development outlined above to create market movement description and prediction models. These models operate on data drawn from the US Standard & Poors 500 index over the period 1980-2012. Two primary models are developed using binomial logistic regressions. The dichotomous dependent variables are drawn as quarters of market rise (1) or no rise (0), and market falls (1) or no fall (0), respectively for the ‘buy’ model and the ‘sell’ model. Variables tested and those found to add to an explanation of the dependent variables include: corporate debt flows, corporate equity flows, corporate dividend flows, interest rates, market volumes, and historical market levels. Each variable is tested for up to ten lags (two-and-a-half years). Collectively, the variables add to our understanding of those factors influencing (or at the least, signalling) market levels, enabling quarter ahead market forecasts to be made with greater accuracy than arises from an assumption of a random walk. This conclusion crystallises the view that company macro-financial flows and prices are an important cause or signal of future market direction.</p>