Professor Robert DeMaria and Margaret Wagh ’20, English Department

The first page of Vassar College’s edition of the Tatler, a collection of every Tatler published from 1709 to 1711. Courtesy of Vassar College Special Collections.

Under Professor DeMaria’s direction this summer, I explored territory often ignored: the thousands of advertisements living in the 272 pages of the Tatler. I aimed to see what products were considered worthy of ink and to learn more of their advertisers. Often repeating, the advertisements included satirical doctrines, historical books, and moral disputes; also advertised were medicines, lost items, lotteries, wines, and countless ephemeral products.

Over six weeks, I pored over Vassar’s volume of the original folios in Special Collections, occasionally referencing online databases of eighteenth-century works. Professor DeMaria and I agreed an accurate, full transcription of the advertisements was needed before anything else, and so I composed an unprecedented digital collection of every advertisement in the Tatler. Following this recording, I moved towards my main task: the abbreviation of the advertisements.

Professor DeMaria and I agreed that the best method of adhering to the original advertisements while reducing excessive repetition was to place a full abridgment in the newsletter in which it first appears, and to place a shortened title in subsequent appearances; our hope was to convey the advertisements’ importance while condensing their appearances. Following the abridgment process, each advertisement will be placed into its respective Tatler in Professor DeMaria’s edition.

My immersion into the Tatler’s advertisements gifted me an insight into early eighteenth-century London, engaging a historical perspective that cannot be found in any other medium but the advertisements. I watched life change, week by week. It was only through reading each advertisement that I was able to witness the rise and fall of what was relevant to the daily life of Richard Steele’s readers. Hopefully, the advertisements, an often-unappreciated genre, will convey these shifts in London’s society in the Cambridge edition.

Professor Ismail Rashid and Oona Maloney ’22, History Department

This summer I worked with Professor Rashid on a Ford Scholars Project on Youth Culture and Black Student activism in the United States and South Africa. The project was split into two components over the course of 8 weeks; for the first 5 weeks, Professor Rashid and I expanded on AFRS 289, an existing 6 week seminar, into a 12 week course. For the second part of the project, I traveled to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. to begin research on an article that Professor Rashid and I will write on I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson, a Sierra Leonean Pan-Africanist, journalist, and unionist.

Reading one of the primary readings for AFRS 289 in the Library

Before Professor Rashid left, we brainstormed weekly topics for the class syllabus and established the student movements that would be studied in class. I helped by reviewing the three primary readings used in the course and sorting out the chapters that students did and did not have to read. I also created weekly folders containing articles that I found and made PowerPoints for each weekly lesson. Professor Rashid spent most of the summer project traveling in Africa, so I kept in contact with him while he was away through weekly WhatsApp calls.

After completing the first part of the project, I started the preliminary for Professor Rashid’s I.T.A. Wallace Johnson article. I traveled to Washington D.C. and stayed for a week to do research at the Library of Congress. At the LOC, I primarily worked in the Madison Building where I looked through 8 boxes of microfilm of three different Sierra Leonean newspapers from the early 1900s to see if there was news about Wallace-Johnson and his political activities. In the future, I will continue to work with Professor Rashid throughout the year on Wallace Johnson research and article writing.

The boxes of microfilm that I sorted through

A microfilm of an article from the Sierra Leonean newspaper the Sierra Leone Daily Mail

Matthew Park ’20, Economics & Mathematics

Professor Sarah Pearlman, Economics Department

This summer I worked with Professor Pearlman on the topic of the impact of declining Mexican migration on US Labor markets, focusing on pre and post great Recession time frame. 

Our first task was understanding the background of such a broad topic, conducting a literature review. We learned that fewer unskilled Mexicans were migrating due to Mexico’s economy on the rise and the US’s massive increase in border enforcement. Consequently, other immigrant groups were filling in the labor shortage, primarily those from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. 

We then began visualizing our findings using the US Census. Our findings confirmed our suspicions; more Mexican laborers were steadily leaving the agriculture and construction industries over the past two decades, being replaced by other immigrant groups. Additionally, we saw a clear trend in fewer Mexicans with high school education arriving, while more college educated Mexicans arriving to the US. 

We also observed that Mexicans were migrating to atypical states such as Washington and the Plains states like Montana and Wyoming. They were leaving heavily Mexican populated areas including California and the border states and moving Northeast, contradicting total immigrant movement trends. This suggested that perhaps immigrant groups did not compete but rather would move elsewhere to seek jobs. 

Lastly, we performed a diff and diff model regression, to observe the impact of an existing Mexican community and the year of the Great Recession 2007 on current immigrant communities in the same area. Interestingly, Asian and Central-American immigrants were most likely to settle where Mexicans were, while there was little correlation for South-Americans, West Indies, and other immigrant groups. 

My experience with this project taught me that researching can begin with a single question, but end up answering and asking completely different questions later in the process. We may not have answered our original question, but obtained invaluable evidence about migration trends of various immigrant groups and their tendencies to follow certain industries. 

This summer, I worked with Professor Gisella Kagy from the Economics Department and explored women empowerment & micro-enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa.

During the first week, I looked at some survey data of about 840 women working in manufacturing in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

For the majority of the project, I worked on another paper that explored the bargaining behavior of clothing micro-enterprises in Hohoe, Ghana and the effects on those behaviors due to personal, household, and firm characteristics of the owners.

Numerous works of literature have used theoretical and experimental frameworks to analyze the bargaining pattern of micro-enterprises, but this paper is one of the first to document the relationship between personal, household, and firm characteristics and bargaining behavior. Using previous works and models, we predicted that the final transaction price would be correlated to how much accessible cash the seller had at the time of transaction.

To investigate this prediction, I cleaned the survey data and prepared it for analysis. There were two major things that I worked on: (a) cleaning the data to ensure consistency between the raw data and the cleaned data (b) handling observations missing values and finalizing all intermediate sample sizes that were used in summary statistics and regressions. The regressions that followed showed that personal liquidity per capita of the firm owner’s household could predict the final price of bargaining: firms with less accessible cash were seen to settle on a lower final price, and this was consistent with our model’s prediction of people with lower personal liquidity being more risk-averse.

Next, I explored the “Price Reasoning” data from the survey to see a pattern that could qualitatively suggest why the firm owners were settling on their individual final prices.  These results can be important in understanding the implications of policies related to bargaining in developing countries.

The Assimilation Era in the late 1800s and early 1900s included policies that sought to assimilate Native Americans into more mainstream “American” culture. Native American households were given land “in trust”, meaning they benefitted from but did not own the land. These plots were intended to transition to “fee simple” land, which gave the beneficiaries of the land ownership rights. Much of this land remained in trust leading to possible differences in economic mobility between owners of fee simple land.

My part project was to use US census data to link people in Native American people across time. Because a unique identification number like Social Security was not put into place yet, we were required to match people on characteristics like name, place of birth, sex, and year of birth. Difficulties arose with this information due to problems like errors in transposing the data, inaccurate birth years, and nicknames, however there are methods to help overcome these difficulties.

The first method used code created by Dr. Ran Abramitzky. This process created “blocks” of people that were based on place of birth and initials. Each person in these blocks were assigned a probability that they were matches with one another and those with the highest probabilities in each were linked. This process resulted in roughly a 10% match rate.

In our next process, we used a Stata program called “Dtalink”, in which the user assigns numeric values to characteristics that match to sum to create final scores that determine if a person is a link. We then incorporate the “Jaro-Winkler String Distance” program that assigns a score to how similarly names are spelled. Our iteration of this method produced match rates of roughly 25-35%.

Nadim Majumder ’21, Economics & Computer Science

Professor Esteban Argudo, Economics Department

This summer, I worked with Professor Argudo and Sarra Yekta ‘21 on the topic of using peer-to-peer lending data to study monetary policy transmission. The main questions we sought to answer were:

• What effect does monetary policy surprises have on loans?
• How are interest rates decided? What are the most relevant factors in its calculation?
• Is it possible to gain an estimation for both the marginal propensity to lend (MPL) and borrow (MPB)?

The dataset we used was sourced from Lending Club, a peer-to-peer lending platform for small loans (<$40,000). Lending Club is atypical among loan-issuing institutions in that it does not directly fund the loans, instead it posts the requests on its site, where investors (individuals, not corporations) can decide to either partially or fully fund the loan. The dataset we collected was very rich, containing over 2.2 million observations (loans) with 147 variables (FICO scores, annual income, debt-to-income ratio) listed for each. However, crucially they were missing the origination dates for each of these loans. 

I began the project by scraping the individual loan listings on the Lending Club website to retrieve the origination dates which would be crucial in answering our first question. From that point forward however, I focused primarily on the second and third questions, allowing my co-worker Sarra to tackle the first. In exploring the data, I discovered that, in 66% of cases, the interest rates for the loans mapped one-to-one to a unique combination of the loan issuance date (MM-YYYY format) and loan grade (ranging from A to G, in increasing order of default likelihood). I then made use of a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to further explore this relationship. In essence, the RDD attempts to identify two groups, one with a treatment effect applied after a certain cutoff point, the other without. By examining the individuals around the cutoff point, it would be possible to determine how similar they are to one another, and so identify reasons for the discontinuity in the interest rates e.g. if two such individuals are the same across all variables except their annual incomes, and they have differing interest rates, then that points to the annual income being the determining factor. I managed to identify 122 such discontinuities through visual inspection, a few pictured below. 

Unfortunately, we then realized that due to the nature of the loan grades (in that they are discrete values), all of the points above technically qualified as discontinuities. As a result, we decided to pivot, instead grouping individuals based on their interest rates, and then making comparisons between these groups. Remarkably, we found that they were similar in most respects – annual income, debt-to-income ratio, revolving utilization when the loan amounts were similar. We were also able to calculate values for the marginal propensity to lend for some of these groups (the change in loan amount given a change in the interest rate). However, about 42.7% of these were negative meaning that they are likely a grouping of both the marginal propensity to lend and borrow.

Further work on this project would possibly involve isolating the MPL and MPB and further investigating the interest rate groupings.

I am very excited to be working with Professor Christine Howlett on this project! Here is a link to the proposed project. https://ford.vassar.edu/projects/2019/musi-howlett.html Here is the link to the summer choral festival that we will be working with. http://www.cappellafestiva.org/dbpage.php?pg=summer_festival

Ford Scholar report summer 2019 

This summer I had the honor of working under the Ford Scholar program with professor Christine Howlett. Our original project was Choral music–research, program planning, and teaching. However, over the course of the summer, my work and research expanded to a variety of topics. At the beginning of our program, we focused on planning the Cappella Festiva Summer Choral Festival. Unfortunately, due to a lack of enrolment, the festival had to be canceled. Howlett and I then began to search for the reason that very few people registered their children for the summer festival. We also worked to develop a new format for the program which hopefully will appeal to parents, teachers, and children for summer 2020. While it was very disappointing to have to cancel the summer festival, I believe I learned a lot from the experience and I am excited about the future of the festival.

In addition to working on the Summer Choral Festival project, I helped Howlett and music department faculty Eduardo Navega begin planning a summer program for both choral and orchestral conducting to be hosted at Vassar College. This program will hopefully take place in the summer of 2020. We hope to attract undergraduate, graduate, and budding professional students from all over the country to come and learn from our faculty and distinguished guests. I am very thankful for this opportunity and I look forward to the success of the programs. 

Alexandria Shaw, Film and Africana Studies, Class of 2021

Professor Mia Mask, Professor of Film on the Mary Riepma Ross ’32 Chair

This summer, I worked with Professor Mia Mask on analyzing changes in African American representations in popular culture from the 1830s-present day. Our primary focus was on the evolution of Black representation in television from its inception until today. Together we studied and discussed the works of Robin Means Coleman, Bambi Haggins, Yuval Taylor, Christine Acham, Donald Bogle, Tommy Lott, and numerous other scholars who have studied the range of Black performances and stereotypes in American culture (i.e., comedy sketch shows, sitcoms, and dramas). 

An exhibit at the Schomburg Center in July 2019.

We traveled to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem to study one of the most under-acknowledged and under-analyzed sections of media, Black documentary television. Here, at the Schomburg’s Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division, we viewed programs such as Black Journal, SOUL!, and Another Voice.  All of these programs were Black produced and hosted shows narrating the social and political issues facing Black America in the late 1960s and 70s. 

Alexandria taking notes on William Greaves’ Still a Brother in the Moving Image and Recording Sound Division. 

Following our readings and visits to the Schomburg, we compiled our notes of Black television into eight eras: 

→ The Minstrel Era (1830-Mid 1900s)

→ The Era of the Servile and Inept (1950s)

→ The Era of White Normalcy (Mid 1950s – Late 1960s)

→ Uplift: The Black Documentary Television Era (Mid 1960s-1970s)

→ The Assimilationist Era (Mid 1960s-1970s)

→ Family Values (Early 1970s-Late 1990s)

→ The Double-Voiced Era (1990s -2010s)

→ Elliptical Blackness (2000s – Present Day) 

Each of these eras is significant in understanding how Blackness, femininity, and sexuality are explored on screens at home. Through every decade, more image-makers working for production studios are diversifying and telling stories that relate to a larger range of the Black experience. We have just begun to evaluate the harmful and demeaning stereotypes embedded within television and have noted how these images have permeated modern day entertainment. With much room for improvement in the entertainment industry, the steps being taken by producers, directors, and screenwriters of color suggests a more promising future for television.

Alexandria looking at an album display in the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division.

This summer, I worked with Professor Zachary Cofran on a virtual reality anthropology learning environment using Unity, a cross-platform game engine. Working on the first version of the lab created by Kamile Lukosiute, Adam Van Arsdale, and Jordan Tynes at Wellesey College in 2017, I was given the task of improving upon the Bio-Anthropology lab aimed to help students learn more about bones, fossils, and their features. By creating a virtual space to observe and interact with these fossils, students will look at fossils without worry of damaging them and professors will not have to wait the hours (and sometimes days) it takes to print viable 3D models of said fossils.

User examining a fossil for placement in the timeline.

In the original lab, users could enlarge fossils to note their characteristics with ease, teleport throughout the main room, pick up and move bones, and select some bones and fossils from a selection menu. With our additions, users have a larger array of fossils to choose from, such as Australopithecus and Neandertal specimens. They can also find information about the bone by toggling an information box, which appears next to the selected bone and displays the bone ID, element, geological age, site of discovery location, and similar specimens. The pedagogical centerpiece of the VR lab is a timeline activity, in which students will have to use reference fossils to identify and determine where other fossils belong in a timeline.

Student testing the virtual reality timeline activity.

This activity encourages students to learn more about the anatomy of certain species and how these evolutionary trends led to modern humans. Ideally, the bone lab will serve as a supplementary tool for students taking the Human Origins course or for those who wish to study fossils but have no direct access to them. With projects like this, the capabilities of VR are shown, and with it new ways to educate students.

This summer, I worked with Professor Brigham on a project that will ultimately address Bill Clinton’s foreign policy and the forces that shaped his ideologies and political persona. For my research, this first meant understanding the demographic changes affecting the country as the baby boomer generation came of age. I poured over U.S. Vital Statistics and Census Reports, tracking population demographics, educational levels, unemployment rates, and ethnic breakdowns between 1944 and 1962. I compared national figures to Little Rock, Arkansas, North Adams, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut, and had remarkable and helpful exchanges with other scholars across the country.

I then moved on to Clinton himself, and looked into his early life in Hot Springs, AK, and into how child welfare and foster care programs operated in the 1950s. 

The Vietnam War escalated as Clinton was in college. When he lost his student deferment in 1968, Clinton was heavily at risk of induction, an experience that deeply influenced the rest of his political outlook. I collected everything Clinton wrote about his father, his childhood, and the Vietnam draft in his 2004 memoir, and compared it to the same information turned up by biographer David Maraniss in 1994. To track the complicated and slippery ways that Clinton escaped the draft by the skin of his teeth, I made a detailed timeline of his draft experiences and a chart to keep track of the sources available to back up what Clinton claims happened and what Maraniss discovered. 

My work culminated with the question “How did the Vietnam draft really work?” I read every book about it in the Vassar Library, plus a few more ordered through ILL. Fascinated and appalled, I produced a thesis-length report on the inconsistent and sometimes shocking ways that the draft operated for men navigating Selective Service and induction both before and after the 1969 draft lottery reforms.