MARS
MARS is a repository service of Mason Publishing and the Data and Digital Scholarship Services (DDSS) at the George Mason University Libraries. MARS provides enduring, stable, well-indexed access to a wide range of scholarship from the Mason community, such as Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), articles, presentations, reports, and creative work. Learn more about publishing, sharing, and preserving research data with the George Mason University Institutional Dataverse, and our other repository services.
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Recent Submissions
The Antecedents of the U.S. Border Patrol
(2018-05) Capps, Alan Philip; Schrag, Zachery
This dissertation examines the antecedents of the U.S. Border Patrol. By reviewing the period 1812-1940, I consider the alternatives the U.S. Congress could have but did not embrace, concerning the establishment of a border patrol force. In doing so, I clarify the process by which the antecedents reveal the developmental evolution of a federal agency designed to enforce the comprehensive rule of federal law not just specific areas of federal law, a concept that for many critics implied a national police force. Among the alternatives studied in this dissertation are the employment of the U.S. Marshals service, initially the only constitutionally empowered agency to enforce federal laws, and the early reliance on questionable state and local militias along the northern border with Canada. Additional alternatives I examine include the volatile and independent-minded Texas Rangers along the majority of the southern border with Mexico, and the early role of the federal army when called upon to assist in the enforcement of federals laws along both borders.
Even full jurisdictional control of immigration policies by the federal government in the 1880s, resulting in a series of increasingly restrictive federal immigration laws through the end of World War One, failed to warrant the establishment of dedicated land border force to enforce immigration restrictions. Only after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 were monies appropriated to expand the nascent ad hoc force within the Bureau of Immigration into a Border Patrol with the sole objective of enforcing immigration laws. Through congressional debates, federal reports, executive actions, and witness testimonies, I detail the subsequent protracted bureaucratic struggle between the Departments of Labor and Treasury in the late 1920’s and early 1930s over the proposed consolidation of agencies and enforcement powers into one unified U.S Border Patrol.
Quality in Architecture-Centric Engineering
(2010-12) Jacobson, Christopher Peter; Brouse, Peggy
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology provides a means to transform existing enterprise Information Technology (IT) capabilities for improved business service. Today the opportunity exists for engineering services to leverage technology stacks from leading technology providers with engineering principles to re-factor existing IT components with SOA-enabling components. This can be done, conformant with standards, to enable communications across IT environments to improve process time, resource footprint and information quality. However, too often the focus with SOA technology is on the cross-functional infrastructure rather than the integrated mission layer composed of applications and services that support business-specific functionality. As a result, it becomes difficult to integrate to performance measures directly related to business needs. The role requirements serve in integrating and delivering solutions based on SOA is evolving. Since SOA enables a more standardized, effective approach to engineer and integrate system-of-systems, the integration “touchpoints” between these systems must be guided by an architectural understanding of the user problem space. This dissertation explores an approach based on Architecture-Centric Engineering (ACE) in which technical objectives for system-of-system modernization spirals are guided by business drivers such as business concept of operations (CONOPS) and key business scenarios. Achieving these objectives is dependent on the development, integration and delivery mechanisms used by such enterprises as found in the business and government sectors. However, Software-Intensive Systems Engineering Environments (SEEs) are not keeping pace and meeting expectations because they rarely incorporate meaningful quality mechanisms. Through case study, improved integration of quality mechanisms in a SEE is advanced. Through proof-of-concept, insights for improved productivity resulting from integration of quality measures into a SEE are discovered. Practical extensions that build on the proof-of-concept contribute to increased capability, improved competitive edge and faster time to market.
Literature Review on Forced Alignment Challenges in Diverse
(2026-01) Dayili, Shaima
Forced alignment (FA) is a foundational technique in speech science that enables the automatic temporal alignment of transcriptions with speech signals. Although FA systems perform reliably for high-resource languages, their accuracy degrades when applied to typologically diverse and under-resourced languages. This literature review suggests that the current constraints of forced alignment are not merely technical issues but are rooted in fundamental representational issues. By synthesizing research from multilingual processing, language documentation, and articulatory phonology, this review illustrates how traditional FA systems often mask critical cross-linguistic differences in articulation and temporal coordination.
Through an analysis of empirical studies involving WebMAUS and cross-language alignment alongside theoretical work on gestural models, this review argues for the integration of gestural scores into computational frameworks. Such an integration provides a principled solution to cross-linguistic variability by capturing the physical realities of speech production that symbolic and purely acoustic models miss.
Metathesis in Jazani Arabic
(2026-01) Dayili, Shaima
This study examines metathesis patterns in Jazani Arabic by examining both adjacent and non-adjacent consonant clusters across three lexical items and their metathesized counterparts. Using acoustic analysis of recordings from a single native speaker, the study evaluates whether these apparent segment reversals reflect categorical phonological reordering or arise from phonetic mechanisms of gestural overlap. Spectrogram inspection, formant tracking, and spectral slicing reveal that, in the metathesized forms, articulatory cues associated with the second consonant in the canonical order frequently appear early, intruding to some degree into the acoustic space of the preceding gesture. This includes premature frication spread, early nasalization, and overlapping velar and rhotic transitions, patterns that are inconsistent with clean, re-sequenced segmental boundaries. These findings suggest that the metathesis observed in both adjacent and non-adjacent clusters in Jazani Arabic is best characterized as a surface phonetic effect resulted from altered gestural timing rather than a true phonological transposition. While the dataset is limited to a small number of tokens from a single speaker, the results provide preliminary evidence supporting a gestural-overlap account of metathesis and highlight the need for broader, multi-speaker investigation to determine the extent and generality of these patterns within the dialect.
"With Eloquent Fingers He Preached": The Protestant Episcopal Mission to the Deaf
(2021-05) Legg, Jannelle; Mullen, Lincoln
This dissertation traces the development of the Protestant Episcopal Ministry to the deaf in the United States between 1850 and World War I. From the classroom to the churchhouse, members of this organization transformed the practices of worship to suit deaf linguistic and sensory ways of being.
During this period the forces of normalization, strengthened by nativism and eugenics, exerted considerable pressure on deaf people to conform to linguistic and cultural forms which diminished the outward appearance of difference and encouraged assimilation. Religious spaces, as with other places of social, political, and legal import, were similarly imbued with these ideas about bodies and language. The auditory delivery of prayers, lessons, and hymns was central to public worship within the Protestant Episcopal Church, as it was with many other religious groups. The formation of the deaf ministry disrupted these practices. From the administration of services and sacraments in sign language, to the elevation of deaf men to the ministry, and the rearrangement or construction of deaf church spaces, deaf community members reordered the spaces and practices of worship
to suit their sensory and social worlds. Over time, a growing network of church workers and community members navigated these systems of institutional power to negotiate for autonomy in expression and spatial organization. They formed missions and churches in major cities across the country, serving as essential gathering sites within broader deaf geographies.
In exploring the ways in which deaf people made sense of their lives and their worlds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, I draw on multiple fields of inquiry including histories of sense, space, religion, deaf people, disabled people, and the digital humanities to interpret and visualize the spread and influence of this ministry.