UMA Research Colloquium

St. Patrick’s Celebrations meet DEI

Wednesday, March 5, 2025 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Zoom™ & In person at 135 Eastport Hall Bangor Campus

From a modest religious celebration of the fabled Christianizer of Ireland, American celebrations of St. Patrick have devolved into displays of every anti-Irish stereotype available in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. In some instances, the perpetrators were Irish. This phenomenon is called Esoteric-Exoteric by folklorists. In other words, the butts of the anti-Irish jokes, took those jokes, turned them around, and used them to bond as an ethnicity—Irish. The Irish became a group surrounded by Anglo Americans, outsiders who even made fun of the way the Irish spoke English. Today, the question remains: are you an insider or an outsider and what is the intent of your joke?

Kay Retzlaf

Professor of English

James Cook

Associate Professor of Sociology

Identity in Online Social Context: Mapping Community Connections Surrounding R/Bisexuality on Reddit

Thursday, November 14, 2024 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Zoom™ & In person at 190 Jewett

No human community, online or offline, exists entirely in isolation. Instead, communities are connected to other communities in a number of ways, including shared membership, interpersonal connection, information flow, and shared physical or cultural space. “Dual” social network models have the potential to trace multiple modes of connection in an online environment, mapping the sociocultural localities within which communities move. In this study, I focus on the context surrounding the liminal identity of bisexuality in the online environment of the social media platform Reddit and the “subreddit” community r/bisexual. Adopting an ego-network method centering the “subreddit” community, r/bisexual, I identified 20 additional subreddits to which its users linked from that community in one month’s time, tracking shared membership, individual interactions, and content of communication in the 19,633 posts and 115,021 comments occurring during the period. Results indicate that the use of social media technologies are diverse in form and content across these subreddits, reflecting different standards and purposes. The structure of links and membership overlaps between these 21 subreddits indicate distinctive clusters of connection, with more tightly connected subreddits sharing both substantive concerns and similarity in sentiment regarding bisexual people and bisexuality. These patterns are accessibly presented in social and semantic network graphs that capture behavioral and cultural connections within which the r/bisexual community is enmeshed. Beyond the particular subject of bisexuality, this distinctively sociological approach has the potential to more broadly map the social and cultural landscapes within which online communities engage, reinvigorating studies of context surrounding the individual.

Conceptual Neighborhoods – A Future Step for Spatio-temporal Decision Support Systems

Thursday, October 17, 2024 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Zoom™

In spatial and temporal reasoning, a mathematical construct known as a conceptual neighborhood graph takes relations between objects and forms a graph between them explaining systematic transfers between the relations. The relations are nodes, while the transfers are edges. Over the past few decades, research has been done on numerous relation sets to identify salient patterns of transfer in these relations. What has not been accomplished is to develop an information system that accounts for this logic, a key piece for moving into decision support systems based on principles of human cognition. In this presentation, I will detail research into conceptual neighborhoods of important relation spaces undertaken by my students (undergrad and grad) and I that pave the way for the future of spatio-temporal decision tools.

Matt Dube

UMA Associate Professor in Data Science, Computer Information Systems, and Applied Mathematics

Jennifer Long

UMA Assistant Professor of Biology

Marielle Postava-Davignon

UMA Assistant Professor of Biology

The effects of human interaction on Canada jay (Perisoreus canadensis) behavior and nest predation

Tuesday, September 24, 2025 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Zoom™ & In person at 180 Jewett Hall

Humans have a long history of feeding birds, either to help them survive by supplementing their diets, or simply to enjoy interacting with them. Canada jays are charismatic birds that have become accustomed to these interactions to varying degrees. To survive the winter, they need to cache numerous food morsels throughout their territory. Their diverse diets include insects, berries, carrion, human offerings, and the eggs and nestlings of other birds. Concern has been expressed in recent years that Canada jays attracted to wilderness recreationists might increase predation pressure on nesting songbirds. To address this concern, we compared jay behavior and nest predation levels in New Hampshire and Maine between sites where little human interaction has been documented, and sites located at popular recreation areas where feeding has been well documented. During May and June 2022-2024, we captured and banded Canada jays to track individuals, recorded their behavioral responses to people in their territory, and used artificial nests with game cameras to document nest predation. Results show that in areas of high human interaction, jays approach closer to humans, usually landing on someone’s hand to take food, spend much more time near people, find decoy nests in less time and find more nests compared to low interaction areas. In areas with fewer human interactions, they rarely approach people, showing no interest in human food. These results suggest that feeding jays may have an impact on breeding songbirds, which could have important conservation implications. Drs Long and Postava-Davignon’s research is featured on Season 19, Episode 6 of the New Hampshire PBS show “Windows to the Wild” hosted by Willem Lange.  Episode 6, entitled “Bird in the Hand”, will be broadcast on November 7th, 2024 at 8 PM.  All episodes of Season 19 are currently available to Passport members.