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Kathryne Beebe, Department of History 

Mentorship for Pursuing Digital Humanities Opportunities

My project, Mentorship for Pursuing Digital Humanities Opportunities, supports a mentorship visit to Dr. Laura Morreale of Georgetown University, in Washington DC, to expand and deepen my activities in the field of the Digital Humanities (DH). I have begun a large-scale DH research project called Digital Observance, which will be an online environment for mapping the spread of the Observant monastic reform movement in late-medieval Europe. It will allow medievalists around the world to upload new findings, analyze the spatial relationships among the data, and download material for further analysis.  My mentorship visit addresses the four critical focus areas of the UNT mentoring initiative in the following ways: gaining institutional knowledge through discussion of DH advising activities; teaching and research efforts by discussion of strategies for offering DH consultations for students and establishing the “next steps” for my Digital Observance research project; developing professional networks through discussion of DH networking possibilities, and finally, promoting diversity by discussions of how to increase gender equity in a discipline within which—as in many other technological areas—women are underrepresented.

To learn more, please contact Kathryne Beebe at Kathryne.Beebe@unt.edu

Samantha Bergmann, Department of Behavior Analysis

Expanding Competence and Developing a Network in Treating Feeding Disorders

To learn more, please contact Samantha Bergmann at sam.bergmann@unt.edu

Hsia-Ching Chang, Department of Information Science

Understanding Cybersecurity Governance and Data Breach Incidents through the Lens of Data Analytics

Data breaches have greatly increased in an alarming rate and impacted organizations and their customers. Cybersecurity governance is an emerging issue that organizations need to consider when aligning their enterprise architecture with cybersecurity processes and supporting technologies to prevent from data breach incidents as well as protect organization assets. This mentoring grant will provide me an opportunity to visit Dr. Heng Xu's Cybersecurity Governance Center and Robust Data Analytics Lab at American University and obtain institutional knowledge. This mentoring grant will also support teaching and research efforts through building my interdisciplinary research career in cybersecurity governance and data analytics. Dr. Xu developed and taught Cybersecurity Governance course, while the co-director, Dr. Nan Zhang, has designed and offered Cybersecurity Analytics course. This grant will help learn from them and obtain insight into the effective instructional strategies, pedagogy, and teaching/research career development of cybersecurity governance and analytics. As for research, while various studies have focused on cybersecurity risks and compliance practices, little research has explored how the attributes (e.g., cause, scope, response time, consequence, and organization reaction) of data breach incidents can be further analyzed and mapped to different cybersecurity governance structures through the lens of robust data analytics.   

To learn more, please contact Hsia-Ching Chang at Hsia-Ching.Chang@unt.edu

Jared Eutsler, Department of Accounting

Improving Accountants Interviewing with the Reid Technique: Classroom and Research Applications

Employers of accounting graduates are placing increasing emphasis on the soft skills that future accountants bring to the workplace—where soft skills might be as important as technical skills. Notably, one of the most critical soft skills is communication. Within the broad spectrum of communication skills, the ability to conduct effective interviews is often overlooked. Individuals with careers in external audit, internal audit, and forensic accounting have responsibilities that include preventing, detecting, and deterring fraud. In this line of work, interviewing skills are paramount. The goal of this project will be to learn interviewing skills from arguably the best, John E. Reid and Associates. Reid training programs are used by Law Enforcement at local and federal levels to teach how to best set up interviews, construct questions, and conduct interviews. Along with Dr. Erin Nickell of Stetson University, I will attend The Reid Technique of Investigative Interviewing and Advanced Interrogation Techniques training program and then we will adapt these skills to an accounting environment, which is notably less antagonistic than law enforcement. As a result, we endeavor to create a classroom application to develop persuasive interviewing skills among our accounting graduates.

To learn more, please contact Jared Eutsler at  Jared.Eutsler@unt.edu

Nora Gilbert, Department of English

Dickens Project Membership and Research Institute Attendance

Several years back, UNT was invited to become a member of the Dickens Project Consortium. The chief goal of this prestigious consortium is to promote research on the life, work, and times of Charles Dickens and to bring the results of this research before both a scholarly audience and the general public. The marquee event of the Dickens Project is its annual, week-long summer Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz called "Dickens Universe" that brings faculty, students, and members of the general public together to discuss one of Dickens's major works. As an institutional member of the consortium, we are required to send one faculty member and one graduate student to the institute per year, and this mentoring grant will help fund my attendance in the Summer of 2021. While the mentoring benefits for the graduate students we send may be the most apparent—they get to attend a wide variety of professionalization talks and seminars, get experience teaching the undergraduate and non-academic attendees of the conference, and get to meet many of the biggest names in Victorian literary studies up close and personal over the course of the week—the mentoring benefits for faculty members are quite robust as well. Personally, I know many people working in the field of Victorian Studies who have developed ideas for collaborative projects (essay collections, special issues, conference panels, etc.) during their week together at Dickens Universe. In particular, I plan to discuss my current book-in-progress, Gone Girls: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the British Novel, 1684-1901, with some of the very scholars whose ideas I am responding to in the course of the project, and know that their feedback will be invaluable as I enter into the final stages of the writing process.

To learn more, please contact Nora Gilbert at nora.gilbert@unt.edu

Davy Mooney, Division of Jazz Studies

New Orleans to UNT Cultural Exchange with Steve Masakowski

I am from New Orleans, and consider myself to be part of the New Orleans modern jazz guitar tradition. I was mentored by a guitarist and educator named Hank Mackie, and also by his student, Steve Masakowski, who runs the jazz program at the University of New Orleans. I want my students here at UNT to get to interact with Steve, and be mentored by him—however briefly—as I was. The DFW area and the New Orleans metro area are only an 8-hour car ride away from one another, but I feel that the vibrant and soulful musical culture of New Orleans doesn't get to be experienced by our students in the College of Music very often. To help remedy this I want to have Steve Masakowski come to campus, do a master class for the jazz guitar players (and anyone else who wants to attend), and then do a concert in Lab West, open to the public. Jazz music is passed down from teacher to student, in both formal and informal settings, and I know it will be illuminating for my students to see where I came from, and how the New Orleans jazz guitar tradition has been transmogrified in me through my experiences in New York and Denton. And hopefully they will also see how they too are part of that tradition, as it continues to transform in the 21st century.

To learn more, please contact Davy Mooney at david.mooney@unt.edu

Morgan Gieringer, Division of Special Collections

Mid-Century Modern Photo Archive Book Project

To learn more, please contact Morgan Gieringer at Morgan.Gieringer@unt.edu

Justin Trudeau, Department of Communications Studies

Petit Jean Performance Festival Grant

This micro grant will support a faculty retreat with peer-mentoring workshops with colleagues from UNT and from other universities that regularly participate in the Petit Jean Performance Festival.  The Petit Jean Performance Festival is the longest running performance studies festival in the nation and UNT Performance Studies faculty and students have organized and hosted the festival for the past thirty years. The specific goals of the retreat are:  1) To secure a location for the fall of 2022 for the performance festival and  2)  To discuss how to best utilize the festival as a space that highlights creative research for ourselves and our colleagues in the area of performance studies nationally 3) To address how best to utilize the faculty and graduate students as teaching facilitators during the festival, and 4) We will discuss how to continue to utilize the festival as an alternative to traditional conferences to develop and sustain professional networks in the field.

To learn more, please contact Justin Trudeau at Justin.Trudeau@unt.edu

Zuoming Wang, Department of Communications Studies

Establishing the social media lab following the Stanford model 

This project will model after the Social Media Lab at Stanford University and utilize and optimize resources to develop a similar social media lab housed in the Department of Communication Studies at UNT. Social media has changed the way we interact with data and other people. Research findings have shown that social media is a suitable channel in promoting research awareness and increasing engagement in the audience. As a result, researchers play a vital role in promoting their organization's knowledge as well as their own. More and more universities have invested in the social media research. Being a recent member of RI universities, it is significant to take the initiative to establish our own social media lab at UNT and grow with this rapid-changing field. 

Using this grant, I plan to have lab visits and in-depth dialogues with my mentor, Dr. Jeffrey Hancock, Professor at Department of Communication, Stanford University and the Founding Director of Stanford Social Media Lab. I plan to learn how to elevate the existing bare-bone framework of computer-mediated communication lab at my department to a top-notch lab that connects interdisciplinary research to understand psychological and interpersonal processes in social media following the Stanford model. Specifically, I plan to seek my mentor's input on how to optimize the available resources at department and college levels, how to form and coordinate a research cohort with diverse background and knowledge from different fields (e.g., communication, information science, social computing), and how to tackle the ethical issues associated with computational social science.  

To learn more, please contact Zuoming Wang at Zuoming.Wang@unt.edu

Haley Zettler, Department of Criminal Justice

Presenting collaborative Research at National Conferences

I will be presenting research by myself and my departmental mentors on predictors of indeterminate sentences for juveniles in Texas at Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Annual Meeting in March 2022. Presenting at the conference will allow us to receive feedback on our project, develop new projects for the future, and communicate our findings to a national audience.

To learn more, please contact Haley Zettler at Haley.Zettler@unt.edu