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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.

SSHRC IG awarded 2021. With this project, I pursue the legacy of influential documentary photographer Lewis Hine, who developed his techniques in the service of his social science teacher role. I examine the historical moments of exchange, influence, or overlap between the worlds of artists and teachers in North America that occurred as part of the early 20th-century Visual Instruction Movement, when art was used to teach, and when teaching tools resembled art. Alongside Hine's efforts to teach social sciences with the camera in 1900s New York -- an instance of teaching tools becoming art -- I will consider Anna Verona Dorris's efforts to bring historical paintings and National Geographic photographs into geography and history classrooms in 1920s California -- a case where art was used to teach. This research will show how visual materials shape ways of seeing and understanding the world. The work will enrich scholarly understanding of the artistic and pedagogical conventions of particular moments in history, address teachers and the general public with an online exhibition of historical teaching materials and an article published in the Alberta Teachers' Association's ATA Magazine. These public-facing outputs will serve 21st-century communities of teachers and learners by calling attention to the role of visual materials in classrooms, and by exploring the potential of artful visuals to produce meaningful and multi-layered learning experiences.

This research utilizes a twofold approach: the general framework of archaeogaming; and the theoretical position of affective history. Using the video game Assassin’s Creed Odyssey as a case study, this research paper provides a critique of the current literature as it relates to the topics of archaeogaming and affective history. Documented archaeological findings of Olympia are examined in known literature, as well as in the designed environment of the video game. The study provides further understanding of how archaeogaming is defined as the “archaeology both in and of digital games” (Reinhard 2) and how the application of affective history theory, the study of the past with emotional and human experience through re-enactment, holds the potential to open new avenues of study in classical archaeology. This research demonstrates how video games and classical archaeology merge together, providing an alternative form of study that can be applied to classical studies.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, the resistance of Canadian prairie farm women to the inequities of the Dominion government’s national policies, coupled with their growing awareness of women’s unequal rights, gave rise to the formation of semi-autonomous farm women’s organizations in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. These women were part of the agrarian protest movement that has left its mark on the political, economic and social structures of Canada. Considerable research has shed light on the organized farm women of Saskatchewan and Alberta, but little has been written about the United Farm Women of Manitoba (UFWM). Drawing on the extensive files of the UFWM preserved in the Archives of Manitoba as well as relevant secondary sources, this thesis situates members of the UFWM in the context of settler colonialism and utilizes the intersectional analyses of gender, class, race, religion, ethnicity and region to examine these women’s lives and work, both on the farm and in the public sphere, between 1916 and 1936. The UFWM resisted the economic and political structures of monopoly capitalism that served the interests of the wealthy and privileged while oppressing those who laboured to produce that wealth and the Indigenous nations whose land was stolen. They worked tirelessly to build an alternative society based on principles of cooperation and a more equitable sharing of the earth’s resources, and they fought for women’s right to vote, to hold public office, to have an equal share in the assets they worked to produce, as well as equality in divorce, separation and child custody. Their strong agrarian class identity prevented them from affiliating closely with urban middle-class women’s groups and they felt a closer affinity with the working class. They stood in solidarity with First Nations when the Dominion government tried to take additional reserve land for returning soldiers after World War I. However, as determined as UFWM members were in their resistance to the constructed hierarchies of gender and class, their strong identity with their British Anglo-Saxon race and Protestant religion eventually led them to support assimilation and eugenics practices. While the UFWM has much to teach us about the liberating possibilities of collective action in the building of a more equitable society, their strong adherence to constructed racial and religious hierarchies reminds us of the ways racism impedes the fight for truth, reconciliation and social justice.

This essay explores how John S. McClintock’s Pioneer Days in the Black Hills: Accurate History and Facts Related by One of the Early Day Pioneers, originally published in 1939 and republished by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2000, is employed as a historical source by historians and in popular cultural contexts (including by scriptwriters for the HBO series “Deadwood”). The essay underscores palpable tensions in a text in which McClintock presents himself as an eyewitness to key moments in Black Hills history, yet claims not to want to speak of himself. Tracing these tensions in the text reveals interesting insights into how we read and classify forms of life narratives and how those life narratives may serve historical understanding and writing. In writing of a life narrative written by an ancestor, I discuss my own relation to the man and the memoir as well the challenges that arise in working on life narratives by kin.

Bi-directional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is the state-of-the-art deep learning model for pre-training natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as sentiment analysis. The BERT model dynamically generates word representations according to the context and semantics using its bi-directional and attention mechanism features. The model, although, improves precision on NLP tasks, is compute-intensive and time-consuming to deploy on mobile or smaller platforms. In this thesis, to address this issue, we use knowledge distillation (KD), a "teacher-student" training technique, to compress the model. We use the BERT model as the "teacher" model to transfer knowledge to student models, ``first-generation'' convolution neural networks, and long-short term memory with attention mechanism (LSTM-atten). We conduct various experiments on sentiment analysis benchmark data sets and show that the “student models” through knowledge distillation have better performance with 70% improvement in accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score compared to models without KD. We also investigate the convergence rate of student models and compare the results to the existing models in the literature. Finally, we show that compared to the full-size BERT model, our RNN series models are 50 times smaller in size and retain approximately 96% performance on benchmark data sets.

This paper describes and explains my thesis installation through the context of the Western world’s perceived culture vs nature binary. The history of nature in Western philosophy as well as the history of European park design, and my own personal experiences with nature in both rural and urban settings, inform the final exhibition and writing. I describe the artistic process I developed to create my glass sculptures and address numerous artists working with similar mediums or content. The relationships that the specific animals depicted have with humans living in urban areas is explained, justifying their inclusion in the installation.

Although Cree people are one of the native groups of the Plains, and those of us living in Edmonton occupy Treaty 6 territory, there is very little discussion of contemporary cultural practices within our education system. In popular literature, native peoples are often referred to in a past tense, as if their culture too is a thing of the past. For these reasons, I decided to explore how funerary practices have changed for this group after the introduction of colonization to better understand how these people have adapted and continue to adapt to a colonial landscape. In order to do so I will examine ethnographic records and an archaeological burial in an attempt to piece together historical practices. It is important to remember however, that ethnographic records are usually written by colonizers and that archaeological burials cannot accurately represent the ritual aspects of funerary practices. Next, I will current ethnographic accounts of Cree funerals and feasting ceremonies to see how traditions have changed over time.

The Chi-Rho (☧), or Christian monogram, is one of the most common religious symbols in Christian art. Traditional archaeology has considered the presence of a chi-rho to be an indicator of a Christian artifact, as a result of a long-standing association with the figure of Christ. As a result, artefacts adorned with the chi-rho have been consistently used as evidence for Christian activity in Roman Britain. An association with imperial figures, however, has created a need to question the validity of these assumptions in certain contexts. After his “Divine Revelation” Emperor Constantine adopted the chi-rho as his personal sign of military triumph and political authority, giving the symbol dual functions representing both religion and imperial power. In Britain, Constantine’s many personal and military connections may have increased the chi-rho’s imperial role. The symbol appears in the province as architectural decoration, graffiti, and on objects as original ornamentation. When this material evidence is reevaluated with consideration for function, context, potential as a religious and/or secular artefact, and the purpose of the chi-rho as part of the objects’ decoration, the Romano-British chi-rho is demonstrated to be a symbol with an ambivalent nature. While in some cases the symbols are religious and/or ritual in function, often the chi-rho is clearly used as an imperial emblem on objects associated with the administrative system, the military, or those displaying fealty to the imperial family.

Vigilantism, to Americans today, is often associated with white supremacist terrorism perpetrated to uphold Jim Crow or with the mythologized gunfighter of the Wild West, entrusted with upholding the law when the state was unable to do so. In Minnesota, however, the arrival of vigilantism in the late 1850s postdated the establishment of courts, secure prisons, and professional law enforcement and it continued, largely unpunished, into the early 1920s. Furthermore, the victims of Minnesotan vigilantism were overwhelmingly white and Indigenous rather than Black. Through an examination of newspaper records, this paper investigates why the demographics of Minnesotan lynching victims were different than in other states and for what reason vigilantism continued to be practiced in the state for so long after a working criminal justice system was established. In this paper I argue that vigilantism went unpunished because it did not threaten the white settler-colonial state, but rather it reinforced the patriarchal, white supremacist ideology which underpinned it. Vigilantes typically were white men who took it upon themselves to regulate the sexual and domestic lives of their communities, punishing extramarital sex, interracial sex, and spousal neglect which often were not crimes in the eyes of the law. In the 1850s to 1870s, white mobs disproportionately targeted Indigenous victims for lynching, with the newspaper record suggesting that white settlers were concerned they would be treated with too much leniency by the court system. In the first two decades of the 20th century, white Minnesotans views of the Ku Klux Klan also changed significantly, from largely viewing them as traitorous, cowardly insurrectionists to being upholders of law and order when the state was unable to provide it due to the spreading of Lost Cause rhetoric from the south. Finally, during World War I, vigilantes targeted people who belonged to left-wing groups such as the Nonpartisan League or the Industrial Workers of the World.