Literature
- Brais Lamela Gomez I compare the inner monologues of male and female characters in As I Lay Dying, a novel that is composed of the first person accounts of different characters, separated by chapters.
- Jessica Jiang This project analyzes the change in readability of L.M. Montgomery’s work over time, specifically her Anne of Green Gables series.
- Alison Dunning I hypothesize that over the course of writing the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling evolved along side her books and the writing style and readability increased, i.e she wrote in a more advanced/complicated way as the series progressed.
- Rachel Rood-Ojalvo I am interested in how conceptions of futuristic possibilities and technological advancements changed over time, so I am analyzing changes and trends in language use to see what they reveal about the development of the science fiction genre of literature.
- Henry Brigham I attempt to answer the age-old question: who wrote the books of the Bible? I compare the writing styles between each of the books of the Old Testament Bible (except for Psalms) in the Old Testament to test for common authorship.
- Brett Helperin The federal Common Core State Standards list books that public schools should teach their students to ensure English & Language Arts literacy throughout the United States. The recommendations for high school, grades 9-11, are some of the most famous works of literature. But are these works assigned at the grade appropriate level? Do the Common Core State Standards have merit?
- Lizzy Doykin The goal of this project is to look further into the differences between the different book genres from given texts using Python and to test which genre contains the most "varied" language that would make it the most distinct genre.
- Caroline Ribet Have you ever heard of Zipf’s law? This mind-blowing mathematical law says that the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank on the frequency table -- the most frequent word occurs twice as often as the second most frequent word, third time as often as the third most frequent word etc.
Art, Music and Movies
- Noah Klein My goal was to contribute to the discussion on rap music by analyzing lyrics from these sub-genres and comparing their complexity, key themes and emotional bias.
- Julia Elia Is it the case that massive music blogs, like Pitchfork, keep the tone of their reviews consistent across genres? Or rather do they tailor the way each genre is written about, specific to that genre's audience.
- Heidy Mendez I think it would be fun to explore whether [John] Hughes did as a good a job of capturing the important concerns and life aspects of his audiences as he’s credited of having done.
- Wendy Cohen Through this project, I intended to conduct a comparative analysis of the avant-garde art manifestos of the early 20th century. I expected to find that the various manifestos of these contemporaneous movements bear similarities in thematic content and syntax, with each text drawing influence from its predecessors.
Government, Politics and Activism
- Sharad Wertheimer However, as more people fought for the right to vote, more and more low-income individuals participated in elections, and so I believe that candidates have made their language more accessible to voters throughout American history, regardless of political inclinations.
- Mili Mitra Each Supreme Court justice has their own set of styles, or phrases and words they use more often. I would like to create a program that analyzes certain aspects of a Supreme Court decision and returns a hypothesis of the author.
- Jenna Knueppel Although this project is not detecting the usage of crisis rhetoric per say, but rather it detects the positiveness, the negativity, and the compound sentiment levels for each State of the Union Address since 1900 until today.
- Yasmin Tomey However, how can our activism perpetuate the very systems of oppression that we are trying to fight? How has the advancement of technology changed how people, especially students, engage with activism today? How can we work together to make our activism more mindful, intentional, and intersectional? I hope to create a program that revolves around the inaccessibility of activism on college campuses such as Brown.
- Maik Hamjediers Given the ideological divide between the American parties, I hypothesize that it is possible to identify the party affiliation of a president by analyzing statements in regard to families within their State of the Union' speeches.
- Aoying Huang This project analyzes the readability of “State of the Union Addresses and Messages” from 1993-2017 to track the readability pattern over time and among the four most recent presidents (William J. Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump).