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This study begins with a discussion regarding the military crises of third and early fourth century Roman Empire and how they appear to have missed Sicily entirely, resulting in the island entering a period of prosperity, especially in the rural regions. The direct link between the establishment of Constantinople as capital of the Empire and Sicily’s subsequent economic boom is also examined. Within this historical context, the relationship between the mosaics of North Africa and those of Sicily begins with a survey of the richly-decorated Villa Romana del Casale near modern-day Piazza Armerina. The extensive collections of mosaics adorning this villa are examined in depth and grouped thematically. Finally, comparisons of the motifs, and the methodologies used for creating these mosaics are made with similar, and in some cases even identical works found in North Africa, especially around Carthage. From this, it can be determined that not only were the mosaics of Piazza Armerina influenced by North African design, but they may have even been made by North African mosaicists themselves.

Pilgrimage: being in the End Times “The gap between phenomenon and thing yawns open, disturbing my sense of presence of being in the world” –Timothy Morton In 1784 a fine layer of carbon was deposited onto the Earth’s crust as a result of human coal-fired industries. Timothy Morton attributes this moment as the beginning of the Anthropocene: the moment when human history intersects with geological time. What we hear about climate change is that the best efforts we can now imagine may delay its catastrophic effects but will not prevent them. As a person living in the beginning of the 21st century, I exist at the apex of this eschatological narrative, sandwiched tightly between the exposition of species-guilt, and the denouement of species-extinction. Despite the potentially crushing burden of living in a geological era generated by human activity, as well as standing under the teetering shadow of the impending ecological collapse, I find it impossible to panic. At times I even find it impossible to care. Not only am I presented every day with images of the social and ecological clockwork running smoothly, but also running against the familiar background of banality. In an attempt to overcome my phenomenological distance from the looming threat of the ecological crisis, I set out on a secular pilgrimage to create points of contact with my material world. Armed with a multitude of cameras, a vehicle, and a furry mammalian costume, I documented this Pilgrimage, contemplating both the kitsch banality and the incomprehensibility of living in ecological end-times.

Recent archaeological excavations at the early urban settlement of Early Bronze Age III Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel presented the opportunity to reconstruct the life-history of basalt ground stone artefacts. In specific, this investigation sought to establish the nature of production, distribution, consumption, and discard associated with these commodities. This study involved a provenance analysis using XRF, a typological analysis, a morphometric analysis, and a spatial analysis. The results indicate that the basalt sources in the northeastern sub-regions of the southern Levant were locally exploited for the small-scale production of basalt artefacts by non-specialised artisans. These commodities were redistributed to Tell es-Safi/Gath residents by a centralised authority. The role Tell es-Safi/Gath played in these long-distance exchange networks indicates the socio-economic prominence this settlement held in the Shephelah. This results further demonstrate the potential of ground stone artefacts for understanding the behaviour and daily life of non-elite people.

The exam from HIST294 (History) taught by Yakub Halabi in December 2016

Contains files related to the thesis "Enhancing Design with Sound," Dongju In, Fall 2015.

Call Centers or Support Centers in different companies aggregate huge amount of audio data everyday. From all the conversations, few conversations demonstrate the disappointment of clients towards services, products or delivery. Finding the sentiment of the customer helps in determining whether the customer was satisfied with the service, product or not. However, manually analyzing the huge amount of audio data is time consuming, laborious, and burdensome. The aim of this research is to develop the deep learning based model which would enable to automatically evaluate the sentiment of a customer throughout a conversation with a call center agent. In this work, we developed Long Term Short Memory (LSTM) based deep learning models for customer audio call data analysis. The proposed pipeline consists of two sequential steps: a) Audio transcription: speech recognition of the conversations and document them in text; and b) Sentiment Analysis: conduct the sentiment analysis on the text data using Natural Language Processing (NLP). We compute spectrogram features from audio data and then fine-tune the LSTM based Deep Speech Model using customer call data. Deep Speech model can successfully transcribe the conversations between client and call center agent in a text form. Then we compute the 1-gram feature from text data which find the occurrence of the words responsible to identify the customer sentiments. We fed this feature into a LSTM based deep architecture which would enable to detect customer sentiments from text data. Recent advances in natural language understanding and generation facilitates to detect customer sentiments successfully as accurate as human experts. Both speech transcription and sentiment analysis part of the proposed tool are very generic in nature which could utilize for other audio data transcription and text sentiment analysis purposes. Tools were developed in python which can be easily transported and adapted in other programming environments.

The exam from HIST286 (History) taught by David S Parker in December 2016

The exam from HIST250B (History) taught by Abigail Agresta in April 2017

The exam from HIST260 (History) taught by Martina Hardwick in July 2017