TED-style Talk: Making Honors Theses More Discoverable Using Scholars Archive

Presenter Information

Hui-Ching Chang, University at Albany, State University of New YorkFollow

Document Type

Presentation

Location

Standish Room, Science Library

Start Date

25-10-2018 10:50 AM

Description

The Honors College is a vibrant community providing intellectual challenges to talented students who are ambitious in pushing the limits of knowledge in the classroom and beyond, maximizing the opportunities available to them, and committing to civic engagement through leadership, hard work, and responsibility.

In this talk you will hear about the Honors College partnering with the University Libraries to provide a better platform for hosting the Honors Theses online. Using Scholars Archive, the University at Albany's Institutional Repository, instead of a hosted web page has made the theses more visible and discoverable allowing for more online attention of the students' work. Through the readership tools available in the repository, students and administrators can better assess the impact of the work. Using the repository will also help create efficiencies to streamline workflows and provide a more sustainable place for storing documentation.

Comments

Hui-Ching Chang is the Dean of the Honors College and Professor of Communication. After completing her law degree from National Taiwan University, she pursued advanced degrees in speech communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Chang has studied Chinese language patterns, specifically Taiwanese national identity as constituted through discursive practices. Her book, Clever, Creative, Modest: The Chinese Language Practice (2010), examines Chinese language behavior from three distinctive yet overlapping dimensions: the manipulative speaker, the artistic speaker, and the humble speaker. Her more recent book, Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan: Naming China (2015), explores how Taiwanese fashion their identities in the shifting and intertwined paths of five names Taiwan used to name China: "Communist bandits"; "Chinese Communists"; "mainland"; "opposite shore"; and the "People's Republic of China." Her other publications have appeared in the Journal of Language and Politics; Discourse Studies; Research on Language and Social Interaction; Journal of Language and Social Psychology; Nationalism and Ethnic Studies; and Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, among others. She was principal editor of the special issue, “Explored but not Assumed: Revisiting Commonalities in Asian Pacific Communication” (2015), in the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. Dr. Chang sees knowledge as intimately connected with everyday practices, and academic adventure as essential to the intellect. She was a Fulbright Scholar, Ukraine (2010-2011, 2012); Chair Professor of the College of Journalism at Xiamen University, China (2009-2012); Visiting Scholar to Hong Kong Baptist University (2007) and Visiting Scholar to National Taiwan University (2003-2004).

Prior to coming to UAlbany, Dr. Chang was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the Honors College, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Faculty-in-Residence, where she pioneered innovative programs like "Cutie's Office Hours" to promote a vibrant living-learning community. She served as Director of Undergraduate Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in her department, and was also a trained mediator for UIC's Dispute Resolution Service. For Dean Chang, being an Honors College administrator requires the same curiosity and urge to learn as it does for research and teaching—it is exciting, energizing, and fulfilling.